“When I began asking myself questions, and looking for another way of photographing people as they really are, I found a friend who helped me get free of my past. And together, with her doing the sound and me the images, we made San Clemente, the film about a psychiatric hospital in Venice. I wrote Notes, my first book, for her. The most important thing about her is her no-compromise career. She does things her way, she thinks first – it’s the opposite of the war reporter ; her photos also bear witness to human folly, and surely with greater power than the reporter does. She’s sensitive, discreet, committed, driven; she has a truly artistic photographic talent that’s been acclaimed all over the world, and what’s more she’s a loyal friend.”
Raymond Depardon

Eleven Blowups
In these pictures everything is true and false at the same time. The raw material was video rushes from Iraq taken by local Reuters correspondents, which I viewed in London. I was looking for pictures of the craters – the “tombs” – that open up in the ground in Iraq several times a week, or even a day. Working on stills taken from the rushes, I put together my own pictures, using computer techniques to reconstruct scenes that were both real and imaginary, and incorpora-ting elements of my own earlier work. This mix of materials comes from different territories – Turkmenistan in 1997, Syria in 1999, Iraq in 2000, the West Bank in 2003-2004 – and reflects the vision of history as chaos that has haunted me since I worked in Beirut in 1982. Sophie Ristelhueber