Photo-exhibition about the Calais Jungle at Paris Centre Pompidou

For a few years, Centre Pompidou gives the floor to photographers for free exhibition at the photography cabinet. After the Photography as a weapon of class exhibition, here’s Calais – Témoigner de la “Jungle” running from October 16, 2019 to February 24, 2020.

The museum wanted it to be an “experience”, and the exhibition provides three different approaches of the situation the refugees and exiled people lived in the Calais Jungle as well as the situation lived by the exiled themselves.

For these three approaches, Centre Pompidou gave the floor to Agence France Presse (AFP) that shot some of the pictures released by the medias, artist Bruno Serralongue and author of the Calais documentary (2006-2018) as well as the inhabitants of the Calais Jungle.

The biggest section, the AFP one, is made in partnership with Agence France Presse and includes interviews with the photographers of the agency who covered the events such as Philippe Huguen, Olivier Morin, photo France chief editor and video executive chief editor Virginie Grognou, as well as other celebrities of the media world such as Le Monde photo director Nicolas Jimenez. The section aims at being a beautiful example of media pictures “targeting events more than the daily life wince it has to inform and stand out against an environment where catching the audience’s attention becomes more and more a competition”.

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Then, in another area, we follow Bruno Serralongue, this photographer who was one of the first ones to feel the secret flooding of the camp in 2005. He documents their attempts to join England, the creation of the Calais Jungle until its dismantling in 2016. His photographs offer an alternative to the media pictures to get a closer look to the history.

Last but not least, the most touching part, the section with the stories of the inhabitants of the Jungle returning with pictures on the highlights of the Jungle, as lived from the inside. Photos and video clips show another reality, different from the one told by the medias, the reality of being exiled and migrating. Some of these amateur photographers have been noticed, and because of the circumstances became renown artists such as young Iranian writer Babak Inanlou who shot a movie devoted to the reflection about the pictures of the “Jungle”.

Besides these pictures, stories from the associative world are brought together in a movie by German artist Andreas Langfeld.