Hagalleria 25 rue Dauphine 75006 Paris France
Mois de la photo 2010 Point information 5,7 rue de Fourcy 75004 Paris France
For several years Didier Ben Loulou has been working in Athens, and this new series of photographs is the result. Although his approach is firmly anchored in reality, he remains faithful to his initial sources of inspiration, refusing to work in a hurry and rejecting the idea of reportage.
For several years he has travelled through this cradle of civilization searching for remains of ancient Attica and showing them in parallel with the realities of modern Greece. He includes pollution, destruction, and mass immigration in pictures that focus on both ancient ruins and new territories where immigrants rub shoulders with travelling people. Hundreds of thousands of people have no choice but to settle on the periphery of Athens, bartering and doing odd jobs to survive and providing an easy, interchangeable workforce for the local mafia. They represent a growing parallel population that is constantly changing and hard to identify, both in human and economic terms. These people, uprooted by war, famine, and global warming, are society’s new nomads. These “travellers”, migrants made into refugees by the march of History, mix with the poorest and most underprivileged city-dwellers. A radical, profound social rift has opened up with dizzying speed; its face is one of shame, homelessness and rootlessness, and its victims’ only real possession is a body that can be used by others and then thrown away. The city of Athens, a cradle of civilisation and culture, has become a kind of paradigm of this radical social transformation.
Didier Ben Loulou has taken Athens as a new field for social enquiry, exploring the transformation of people and bodies into mere commodities and the themes of exile, rootlessness, and poverty. As in Jaffa (1983/1989) and Jerusalem (1991/2006), he relentlessly challenges the founding myths of cities by showing how they reflect the uncertainties and fragilities of the modern world.