Spanish Republicans crossing the French border, Vietnamese "boat people" in the China Sea, Syrians on the roads of Central Europe, Latin Americans trying to cross the wall of Donald Trump ... We all have in mind images of refugees. Whether they date from the First World War or contemporary conflicts in the Middle East, there have been many waves of displacement. And the migrant crisis is still topical.
In his latest book "A Century of Refugees" (Editions du Seuil), historian Bruno Cabanes, holder of the Chair in Modern Military History at Ohio State University, has chosen to retrace the history of these exoduses by analyzing these clichés which have illustrated our newspapers for several decades. For France 24, he returns to this particular gaze of photographers which has evolved over the past century.
France 24: How did you come up with the idea of making a book on the photographs of refugees?
Bruno Cabanes: A few years ago, I worked on humanitarian aid in the aftermath of the First World War, particularly for Russian refugees who fled their country because of the civil war. It was the time when the first non-governmental organizations, such as Save the Children and Near East Relief, developed. These transnational organizations face several challenges: that of sending medical personnel to the field and sending food to the refugees, but also that of raising money from private donors. This is where humanitarian photography comes in.
Former war photographers are sent to Constantinople, Athens, Berlin, where refugees flock, to capture situations of distress. We must find the means to move the public without tiring them, because in the aftermath of the Great War, most Western countries have other concerns, such as the reconstruction of regions destroyed by the fighting, the reintegration of ex-combatants or the return of prisoners of war. So I started working on humanitarian photography as a war historian.
When did the first humanitarian photographs date?
The first humanitarian photographs, that is to say photographs intended to document and denounce human misery, date from the Balkan wars of 1912-1913, a period when the displacements of populations are particularly important. Remember that this is also the time when international humanitarian law begins to emerge with the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907, which set the rules of the law of war and seek to stem the abuses against civilians. The photograph is then used as evidence of crimes against international law perpetrated in the Balkan wars.
A few months later, at the time of the invasion of Belgium and the north of France, in the summer of 1914, the violence of the German army threw hundreds of thousands of refugees on the roads of the exodus. When the latter arrived in Paris, professional photographers sought to share the experience of these men, women and children by photographing them, haggard, sometimes pushing prams loaded with a few goods through the streets of the capital. Humanitarian photography then took part in the intense propaganda campaign of the Great War.
You show through this book that the look on refugees has changed over the decades. What have been the main developments?
After the period I have just mentioned, the first major turning point was the Spanish War. While the photographs of the beginning of the XXth century mainly represented crowds of refugees, the photographers then sought to capture individual expressions, postures, faces. It is a question of fair distance, would have said Capa, for whom it was besides as much an aesthetic problem as moral. The involvement of many photographers in the Spanish War is well known. An episode seems to me to sum up this new way of photographing refugees, it is the moment when nearly 500,000 Spanish Republicans flock to the Perthus Pass, after the fall of Barcelona in January 1939, pending the opening from the French border.
The second major turning point in humanitarian photography, it seems to me, is the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s with the Biafra crisis and the "boat people". A new generation of photographers, like Gilles Caron, very marked by their experience during the Algerian war, supports the development of NGOs like Doctors Without Borders. The camera is used as a weapon against the indifference of public opinion.
In the 1990s, the photography of refugees finally experienced a form of sensationalism. Think for example of the obscene advertising campaign of the Benetton brand representing a boat on which a veritable swarm of Albanian refugees has piled up.
Even today, we face these photos almost daily. What role do they play in our perception of refugees?
These photographs completely determine how we perceive refugees. This is why they are so important, also why photographers have a moral responsibility because what do we see most often? Crowds, not individuals; men and women frozen in the present. What do we know about the reasons why they fled their country? Without a past and a future, often photography only reinforces their dehumanization. The philosopher Hannah Arendt, who had to flee from Nazi Germany, expresses it magnificently in a small text of 1943, entitled "We other refugees " : "If we are saved, we feel humiliated, and if we helps us, we feel degraded. "
Have you designed this book with the idea of deconstructing certain stubborn stereotypes about refugees?
Yes, it is a history book, but it is also a committed book. After having worked on these thousands of images of refugees for a long time, what keeps striking me is the violence they inflict on those who are photographed. This violence is not only due to the position in which photography maintains them: that of objects subjected to pity, curiosity or voyeurism. It also comes from the moment it freezes them, that of their rescue or their taking in charge by the humanitarian organizations. The men and women thus photographed cease to be individuals with plans for the future. They are reduced to the state of survivors. Many photographs also give, more or less confusedly, the impression of an invasion. However, I would like to recall a fact: at present, 85% of population movements are between third world countries, not from North to South.
Are contemporary photographers trying to represent them differently today?
This work is indeed a tribute to a whole new generation of photographers whose work I admire: Sergey Ponomarev, Tyler Hicks, Yannis Behrakis, Anabell Guerrero, Anne AR and many others. They undertook to give back a voice to the refugees by entrusting them with the task of photographing their daily lives, by taking an interest in individual lives rather than in collective destinies, by accompanying the photographs with texts which explain what difficulties they have gone through, or simply by giving them back a first name, an age. Others are interested in the objects that the refugees took with them. It seems to me that they offer, each in its own way, the possibility of an exchange between the one who watches and the one who is watched.
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