Samuel Gratacap
For nine years, the thirty-two-year-old French photographer Samuel Gratacap has followed the lives of refugees and migrants crossing the Mediterranean, documenting moments of departure—and the emotions of waiting—at sites including the Italian island of Lampedusa and a detention center in Marseille, France. At its peak of operation, the transit camp at Choucha, Tunisia, where Empire is set, received upward of two hundred thousand migrants, many fleeing the crisis in neighboring Libya and others escaping conflicts in West Africa and Southeast Asia.
“My work,” Gratacap says, “is about these territories of movement: the border crossings, the waiting zones for daily workers, the prison, as well as the places related to the ‘rest’ of the body, the paths toward a newfound identity. How does it feel when one person is, at the same time, not feeling at home and not being accepted as a foreigner? How does the body ‘store’ both the rootlessness and the rejection?”
Gratacap has exhibited his work in several group and solo shows, including a solo exhibition of Empire at LE BAL, Paris, in 2015. His work has been featured in the Athens Photo Festival at the Benaki Museum. Gratacap is represented by Galerie Les Filles du Calvaire, …
For nine years, the thirty-two-year-old French photographer Samuel Gratacap has followed the lives of refugees and migrants crossing the Mediterranean, documenting moments of departure—and the emotions of waiting—at sites including the Italian island of Lampedusa and a detention center in Marseille, France. At its peak of operation, the transit camp at Choucha, Tunisia, where Empire is set, received upward of two hundred thousand migrants, many fleeing the crisis in neighboring Libya and others escaping conflicts in West Africa and Southeast Asia.
“My work,” Gratacap says, “is about these territories of movement: the border crossings, the waiting zones for daily workers, the prison, as well as the places related to the ‘rest’ of the body, the paths toward a newfound identity. How does it feel when one person is, at the same time, not feeling at home and not being accepted as a foreigner? How does the body ‘store’ both the rootlessness and the rejection?”
Gratacap has exhibited his work in several group and solo shows, including a solo exhibition of Empire at LE BAL, Paris, in 2015. His work has been featured in the Athens Photo Festival at the Benaki Museum. Gratacap is represented by Galerie Les Filles du Calvaire, Paris.
Courtesy of Aperture
