Madagascar has hosted me since 1976, on an eleventh of November. I have traveled this country more than any other. These two facts do not guarantee a fine harvest. Especially if photography is not your main profession, because everything holds you, everything takes you: in a way, you are stolen from the country in which you live.
Yet, a “good” photographer, like a good soldier, must be a photographer on a mission, body and soul. From then on, one must go out and face it.
Despite nearly five decades in Madagascar, I remain a foreigner: you cannot escape your appearance, your accent, your lifestyle, your look. All the better, in a sense: with one foot outside, I have a “perched” point of view. And in a land where, advantageously, foreigners are few, you often benefit from an initial dose of sympathy, which gives you a starting capital.
Madagascar, a photogenic country? You won’t experience the huge landscape shocks of Africa, nor will you encounter its giant animals or outsized people; Madagascar, quite on the contrary, is “mini” — in its animals, its people, its landscapes. Mini but “Gasy”: it is a detached mini-continent, which has developed its own fauna, its own language, its own rites. Its population is a patchwork of Africa and Asia; English and French influences have shaped other particularities. You will not find another Madagascar anywhere else.
Madagascar is not on the great traffic routes, and this country is still preserved from globalization. It has not been as disfigured as Cambodia, for example, with its gridlike markets imagined by ill-advised urban planners, or its mercantile towns, stretching for kilometers in identical cubes devoted to trade, neon, plastic, and its millions of Chinese tourists.
Perhaps unfortunately, poverty also preserves. Otherwise, why would one still find in Madagascar so many thatched roofs and motorless dugout canoes? Tourism here is discreet, its beaches are not covered in concrete. Ten kilometers from the capital, it is the Middle Ages: no running water, no electricity, carts crisscrossing the hills, nightmarishly eroded tracks, and days paced only by the succession of daylight and darkness.
All of this develops a sense of otherness that restores to photography its letters of nobility: photography rescues from oblivion people and places under threat.
Photography also requires empathy for its Subject. And this is where Madagascar spoils us: there is not a single village at the end of a beach or a mountain path that does not reveal the marvelous ingenuity of its inhabitants adapting to hostile environments. Humanity is perhaps better valued in a toy or makeshift utensil born of agile hands than in its atomic bombs, its artificial intelligence, or its skyscrapers “scraping the sky.”
I do not act as an ethnologist, a sociologist, or a political scientist. With one foot in ecology (as a tool of preservation), I aim at aesthetics in things and people (their evolving ingenuity, their daily struggle). The “aesthetic” displayed here opposes both the sanitized vision of a brochure-style Madagascar and the shock-reporting intended to make people weep in their cottages (as the media often do today). Madagascar holds a richness and uniqueness that will one day disappear, flattened by a certain idea of “progress.” Here, it is the visual artist, armed with a camera, who speaks.