Belfast

"I subscribe to Reporter-Objectif, a monthly photography magazine. It explains how to become a war correspondent and gives a lot of very useful practical advice such as: how to choose the right bag, the right camera, the right shoes... The most affordable conflict, according to the magazine, the cheapest for apprentice photographers like me, is that of Northern Ireland. You have to take the bus from La Madeleine in the evening around 10 p.m., then a boat from Calais in the middle of the night, a train to London where you change stations for another train to Stranraer in Scotland, and finally the ferry to Larne, before a last bus to Belfast. Two days of rainy travel guaranteed, a crossing that is never convenient, but an unbeatable price for the time..."

This is how Gilles Favier's collection of photographs of Belfast opens in 1981. Undoubtedly one of the most talented photographers of his generation, he obsessively returns to this territory year after year, right up to the present day, where Ireland is back in the news with Brexit. This book also follows the evolution of its author's photographic style, and the transition from black and white to color.

"The ambition, expressed in a somewhat provocative way in its assumed nonchalance, could seem simply personal (a young man in search of adrenaline in contact with History in the making), if it did not lead, almost forty years later, to a corpus of exceptional, difficult and profoundly human images, bearing witness to the dramas and joys (sometimes) of a combative but wounded population. […] The tone is dark, like the whole of a book full of tears and rage, at a time when identities are rearming, and when the effort to create civilization proves impossible for many.", Fabien Ribery, L'Intervalle, June 2, 2018