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The Bayeux Calvados-Normandy Prize allows us to tell and show past or current conflicts in all their forms. Focus in pictures on the aftermath left by ISIS in Iraq and Syria and on the "big march back" in Gaza.
From our special correspondent to Bayeux,
How do those who lived under the yoke of the Islamic State group regain a taste for life? How is it possible? That's all the work of Nicole Tung, 33 years old, photo-reporter. To show the war without going to the front, " in a way, it is more stimulating: we try to note the small details that can let imagine what life was under the Islamic State for several years ", confides- she in an interview at Ouest-France.
Life above all
And the "little details" that show that life is resumed are striking. In June 2018, Nicole Tung photographed young men who find a taste for life by dancing in the pink and green floodlights of a restaurant in Kobane , a city invaded twice in 2014 and 2015 by Islamic Daesh. Or even bare-bodied men bathing in thermal baths in Hammam al-Alil two days after Iraqi forces liberated the IS city as they retreated further into Mosul.
The exhibition devoted to this moment of transition between the end of a conflict and the return to life is aptly named: strong as war, gentle as peace. Nicole Tung focuses mainly on Mosul and Raqqa, capitals of the self-proclaimed caliphate of the IS from 2014 to 2017. Fighting, death, displaced, and still civilians as the first victims of barbarism. Those are also here who will try to put their city back in the middle of devastated landscapes where still hang the ghosts of the war.
► A (re) read: The Bayeux Prize rewards RFI journalist Sami Boukhelifa
Families come together, the girls go back to school, the women take off the niqab, the men watch the football matches again or play dominoes in the cafes ... They can shave again. Powerful also, the photograph on which children play in the courtyard of a school with walls riddled with bullets, reopened in January 2018 after being the place of violent fighting during the offensive to take the city back to the IS.
Health Hécatombe in Gaza
A short distance from the works of Nicole Tung, Gaza: out-of-state population; an exhibition that includes a series of views on the "great march of the return", which commemorates the Nakba, the Palestinian exodus of 1948. For more than a year, this movement of protest paces the lives of Gazans.
Under blockade since 2007, the Gaza Strip is undergoing a drip and its population is cruelly dependent on humanitarian aid. The photo exhibition proposed in Bayeux is the result of a collaboration between photographers and Doctors Without Borders, an NGO that keeps alerting about the humanitarian situation that is worsening on this 365km2 strip of land where there are almost two millions of Palestinians. From March 2018 to June 2019, more than 7,200 Palestinians were shot and wounded during demonstrations of this "great march back".
► A (re) read: Bayeux Award: the photographer Alfred Yaghobzadeh exposes on the walls of the city
Last year, during the 70th anniversary of the Nakba, the repression of the Israeli army was fierce and deadly. Yet, the mobilization continues near the border. And the images are eloquent.
If Nicole Tung's clichés bring some form of optimism and confidence in the future, although peace remains fragile, the photos taken in the Gaza Strip leave little room for hope: Molotov cocktails against real shots, women lost in tear gas clouds, scenes of funerals, wounds, desolation in their pure state.
Proof of this is that the reported images are intense: it is the photographer Mahmoud Hams who received last year for the second time the prize in the photo category. His picture shows a 29-year-old Palestinian, with both legs amputated, throwing stones from his wheelchair in May 2018 in Gaza near the border. This is the visual poster of the Prix Bayeux this year.
►Exhibitions to see until November 3 in Bayeux