synopsis
Migration has become one of the most important contemporary issues worldwide. Many artists are tackling it, aiming to offer a different perspective on a subject that the media relentlessly covers. To overcome this obstacle, documentary photographer Mathias Benguigui chose the path of history, focusing on the island of Lesbos, where two migration narratives intersect. One, recent, is now on everyone's mind: in 2015, nearly 500,000 refugees, primarily from the Middle East, washed up on the beaches of this Greek island, just 12 kilometers from the Turkish coast. The other is older and less well-known. These mass arrivals have awakened the collective memory of the island's inhabitants, for whom they echo the "Great Catastrophe" of 1922—the exile of 1.3 million Greek Orthodox Christians who had lived in Asia Minor since antiquity but were forced to flee the ethnic cleansing orchestrated by Mustafa Kemal, founder of the Turkish Republic. 45,000 of them arrived on Lesbos in abject poverty.
The Songs of the Asphodel—this mythological place in the underworld where souls who have committed neither crimes nor virtuous deeds wait eternally—is a documentary exploration that draws on the juxtaposition of this dual historical strata. By thus freeing themselves from current events and their iconographic conventions, the authors open up a space for sensitive and poetic creation. Through a series of images blending landscapes and portraits of the island's population, both islanders and migrants, Mathias Benguigui offers an interpretation of the challenges facing this territory by blurring the lines between fiction and reality. Agathe Kalfas's texts respond to the language of the images, enriching the narrative and immersing the reader in the complexities of daily life on the island.
The book is punctuated with selected excerpts from the works of two emblematic poets of the so-called "1930s generation," who helped redefine the identity of modern Greece in the aftermath of the Great Catastrophe of 1922: Odysseus Elytis, from Lesbos—like Sappho, the most famous ancient Greek poet—and Constantine Cavafy.
photos of the book
technical information
publisher : Le Bec en l'Air
2021
152 pages
72 photographs
dimensions : 19 x 25 cm
2021
152 pages
72 photographs
dimensions : 19 x 25 cm
about Mathias Benguigui
Born in 1991 in Avignon, Mathias Benguigui lives and works in Paris. Initially an assistant to Jean-Paul Goude and Bettina Rheims, he began working as a photographer for cultural institutions. In 2016, he graduated from EMI-CFD Paris with a degree in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography and won the Paris Match/Puressentiel Student Photojournalism Grand Prize for his first report, entitled Tao. He then began collaborating with the newspaper Libération as a picture editor. Since then, he has continued to work for the press as a photographer and picture editor while also producing long-term personal documentary projects on subjects such as identity, memory, and displacement. In 2019, he was nominated for the Joop Swart Masterclass of the World Press Photo by the VU' Agency. The photographic series featured in this book was a finalist for the Mentor Award, the Albert Kahn Award, and the Maison Blanche Award.
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publisher : Le Bec en l'Air
2021
152 pages
72 photographs
dimensions : 19 x 25 cm
2021
152 pages
72 photographs
dimensions : 19 x 25 cm