LOIC AND CECILE
February 2012: It is a simple, ordinary and singular story.
In 2008, Loïc left Paris for Mali. Dropped in Segou, he stayed at his stepmother’s home. Four years later, a home sweet home and some adventures, he married Cecile. He is planning to live there despite the difficulties, inherent or transient. On this occasion, Carima (his mother), Hervé (his father), Hadrien (his older brother) and Awa (his stepmother) went to see him. It was the occasion to see Loïc again, to meet Cecile and Segou for the first time for some, again for others.
It was the same about Bamako, the Segou former colonial neighbourhood, the blue door, the Angouleme neighbourhood behind the Cheick Modibo Diarra school, bus crossing at 60 miles per hour on dusty road, getting out of the bus red of sand because you were sweating like hell, hearing mothers and grandmothers praying in the bus for a safe arrival, the Tamasheqs, gas sold in one litre glass bottles on the side of the road, eating aloko, sleeping at The Wild Goose a brothel held by a former chinese common law prisoner because all the other cheap hotels were full at that time of the night…..
But it was mostly for Loïc and Cecile.
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JEREMY SAINT-PEYRE was born on Febuary 24th 1987 in Annecy, France. I discovered photography in history books when I was a teenager. I saw uncredited shots by Capa, Burrows, Ut… I remember my astonishment when I learned that being a witness to historical events like this could be a profession, and that these pictures were not just souvenir photos taken by the protagonists. I started taking photos while I was studying graphic art in Paris.
From a hobby it became such a passion that I was hardly able to continue my studies. Finally I was accepted by a school of photography where I developed solid technical skills and reinforced my taste for reportage at the same time as I was developing an interest in documentary photography. During these two years I did my first serious project in Kibera. It was the first time I had been to Africa, so I had a lot of the prejudices that Westerners usually have. I had planned the project well, for about four months before leaving. So I was able to spend three full weeks in Kibera in order to making up my own mind about the social, hygienic, ethnic, and cultural difficulties I encountered. Anyway, my prejudices were shattered. From the time I took my very first picture right up to the end of the project, I realized that I could not deal with the different aspects of the subject separately, because they were the causes and the consequences of the context, constently influencing one another. To cut a long story short, having seen the Eiffel Tower does not mean you know Paris. I continued to developed this approach since then.