Documentary photography, more than a mere account of reality, can be a powerful tool for understanding the world and its complexity. Through their medium, photographers can choose to share their vision of the world with readers, not so as to feed them with ready-to-believe truths, but so as to provide them with means of critical thinking enabling them to assess the documented situation by themselves. In other words, photography can be a language of its own.

But even when it is so, many aspects of documentary photography need to be debated. Where do photographers speak from? How do they cope with the distortion between the human relationships they trigger for the sake of their documentary enterprise and the turning of the intimate outcome of these relationships into a public communication object, if not a merchandise? How do photographers apprehend the dilemma inherent to the building up of a career based upon the representation of the Other – mostly of their sufferings?

These are but some of the questions that Frédéric Lecloux will raise, taking his documentary work about Nepali migrations to Qatar as a starting point. A photographic work that looks at migrations from the perspective of both the daily life in the labour camps in Qatar and the consequences of the absence of men in Nepal, in an attempt to understand the long-term human and societal costs of this exodus, at once for the individuals, the families and the social fabric of the
country.

About the Speaker:

Frédéric Lecloux was born in Brussels, Belgium in 1972. He currently resides in Nyons, France. Graduating with honours from the École nationale supérieure de la Photographie d’Arles (June 2016), Frédéric Lecloux is an autodidact photographer and associate editor at Le Bec en l’air in Marseille, France. He also teaches a workshop at photo.circle in Kathmandu, Nepal and at the Rencontres d’Arles in France. Lecloux is a recipient of the 2016 Leverhulme Trust, an Artist in Residence Grant, which he received for a residency at the University of Nottingham in 2017. Frédéric Lecloux’s work has been distributed by Agence VU' in Paris since 2003 and is published by Le Bec en l’air.