Calais

Between 2006 and 2020, French photographer and artist Bruno Serralongue conducted a prolonged engagement with the community of refugees on their last stop in a long journey to reach England. The resulting photographs, which formed the basis for an exhibition at Pariss Centre Pompidou in 2019, are published here for the first time. Serralongue captured disparate moments in the lives of the exiles, their attempts to reach England and their provisional camps which were dismantled by the French government in 2020. Serralongues images employ a suspended temporality that contradicts the sensationalised images broadcast by the mass media, recalling the visual traditions of history painting more than photojournalism. The slowness of his photography, a characteristic of working with a view camera, requires both a distance from, and a proximity with, the subjects photographed, achievable only due to a relationship of trust built with the inhabitants of the Jungle.