Didier Ben Loulou has been leading a research in Athens for some years, which has resulted in a new set of photographies. Although his approach remains deeply anchored in reality, he stands by his first inspiration, refusing to work in the present and in the rush, objecting to the very idea of report.
For some years, he has been pacing up and down this Mecca for civilization in order to glimpse in it the remains of the ancient Attica by confronting it with modernity. He makes of pollution, destruction, and mass immigration the true issues of a perspective which goes from the ancient ruins to those new territories on which live and work populations of immigrants who rub shoulders with travellers. Those hundreds of thousands of persons are left with no other choice than to settle in the outskirts of Athens, swapping, living of small jobs, acting as a workforce, easy and interchangeable, for all the gangs. They represent a growing population, which lives in a parallel world, is on the move, and hard to identify as far as the human and economic aspects are concerned. Those persons uprooted by wars, starvation, and global warming are the new nomads of our societies. Those “travellers”, those new migrants, refugees of History on the move, mix with the poorest and most destitute inhabitants. This deep and radical breaking off occurs at a breathtaking speed; it has the face of shame, wandering, and uprooting. While they only have left a body that can be exploited for the sake of survival. Athens, city of civilization and culture par excellence, has become a kind of paradigm of this radical mutation. Didier Ben Loulou uses it as a new field of inquiry, more social, favorable to an exploration on how beings and bodies become “commodities”, of exile, wandering, and poverty. As in Jaffa (1983/1989), in Jerusalem (1991/2006), the photographer constantly questions the founding myths of cities by confronting them with the uncertainty and fragility of the current world.

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