In Spleen and Ideal, beauty is pursued across the disintegrating boundaries between male and female. Transgressive sexual encounters with what at times seems to be one and the same person are captured on instant film and mixed with impressions of the urban architecture in which they are anchored. In this project, which centers on gender and identity confusions, photography is a matter of decisive distance between immersion and detachment. All images were taken in Thailand between 2010 and 2011, and form the first part of a larger body of work in progress, born out of a persistent urge to photographically confront questions regarding gender and sexuality.

This is the portrait of Guatemala City, a Central America capital that has become particularly dangerous. The cities of this world’s region are facing the major problem of urban violence, which has increased with the Maras’ phenomenon. Those gangs are leading Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras into an indescribable murder psychosis.

« August, 1943. Night is falling on Calcutta, silencing its flocks of ravens, but wakening another kind of life – a feverish, hidden one : in the Maidan, that open space at the city’s heart, there are shadows waiting. » My uncle, Thaï Doan na Champassak, published Ancestral Voices by Collins – London in 1956 and began his autobiography with this sentence. Mobilised in Algiers during the Second World War, he was sent to China as a trained parachutist in charge of a secret mission destined for clandestine entry into Indochina, then occupied by the Japanese. This extraordinary story has its beginnings in Calcutta, the starting point for his mission to Chungking. In the first chapter he...

At the time of the Tamil New Year, and for approximately one week, several of Villupuram's lodges turn into brothels. Most of the rooms are rented out to Indian eunuchs known as Hijras or Aravanis who have come from all over India to attend a village festival dedicated to Koothandavor, an effeminate incarnation of Krishna.

We are haunted by the will to live as soon as we are born, and striking against death is our every day obsession. From far-off times human being managed to get to grips with his fear of the beyond by confiding its destiny to the protecting gods. Helped by faith, the mere mortal is promised to an eternal felicity at the end of its earthly life. That's this life cycle, through its symbolic and spiritual dimension of the fourth elements, which was the main theme of my photographic project. To illustrate my words, I choosed two countries whose inhabitants worship the nature forces : air, earth, fire which can be from time to time beneficial or malicious spirits, beneficial elements to venerate...

We are haunted by the will to live as soon as we are born, and striking against death is our every day obsession. From far-off times human being managed to get to grips with his fear of the beyond by confiding its destiny to the protecting gods. Helped by faith, the mere mortal is promised to an eternal felicity at the end of its earthly life. That's this life cycle, through its symbolic and spiritual dimension of the fourth elements, which was the main theme of my photographic project. To illustrate my words, I choosed two countries whose inhabitants worship the nature forces : air, earth, fire which can be from time to time beneficial or malicious spirits, beneficial elements to venerate...

Pilgrimage in the centre of the world: Among the countless Himalayan holy places, Kailash Mount, in a high and isolated enclave of the western Tibet, has become famous for the hieratic quality of its round and curiously symmetrical dome, and for its great importance in the eyes of believers. Presumed spring of the four biggest rivers of Asia (Indus, Sutlej, Brahmapoutre, and Gange), centre of the world for Buddhist people, Hindus, and Jains who assimilate it to the mythical Sumeru Mount, it gathers Indian, Tibetan, and Nepalese pilgrims the time of a circumambulation. Every believer needs to go one time in his life to this place named in Tibetan Kang Rinpoché, “the precious mountain”, to...

The Ethiopian Church is one of the most ancient Church in Africa. It is said to be apostolic because it would have been founded by Saint Mathias, the disciple who takes the place of Judas in the apostle college. Then, it was separated from great Christianism trends during almost a thousand years, after Egypt became Muslim. More than a simple story, there is here a great portraits series: of Christian people, of their environment, and of their rites.

The Juchitan town, south of Mexico, has ever since got the particularity to have a relatively rich matriarchal society in a country with a strong chauvinist tendency. Here, women control practically everything: politics, local products selling on market, party organization, and financial matters. With this surprising social regime, there is in Juchitan a lot of men dressed up as women. We call them “Muxe”. Very young, boys realise that it’s better to be a woman in Juchitan, and that’s why they are a lot to dress up as a woman for economic or social reasons. Once they become women, Muxe people are accepted as women and have same professional and personal rights.

With a population exceeding the billion of inhabitants and more than 5,1 millions people touched by Aids, India becomes the principle spread centre of the HIV epidemic in Asia, in the Pacific area, and in the entire world. The Indian subcontinent is beating the sad record of South Africa, country with the most important number of people is living with the illness. This report, testifying of the dramatic situation in which Indian hospital and health centre’s patients live, intends to lean over the three principle vectors of epidemic propagation: prostitution, drugs addicts’ syringes, and lorries. Nevertheless, it exists another spread of contamination, as virulent as the others, but less...

This photographic reportage is about the inhabitants of Jharia, a coal field area in Southern Bihar, India. This region has been hit by the unique phenomenon of mine fires which started in 1916 and is rapidly destroying the only source of prime coking coal in the country. The main focus of the story is to show the residents living in this subsidence-hit area and the dangers associated to is such as pollution and land caving.