“Blessed are the moments, the millimetres, the shadows of small things.” — Fernando Pessoa

Born from a collaboration with sociologist Francesca Sirna (CNRS, Marseille), this photographic project explores the lived experiences of foreign-trained healthcare workers in southern France during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Between hospital corridors and intimate interiors, between exile and belonging, each story unfolds at the intersection of care, migration, and personal transformation.

Where words fall short, images remain
Some stories resist language.
During the interviews, voices carried memories of effort, displacement, resilience—sometimes pain. Not all journeys were marked by suffering, yet all bore the weight of decisive choices: to leave, to learn, to care, to begin again.
Photography entered where words hesitated.
Each encounter became a suspended moment—brief, intense—where past and present coexisted, and where emotion resurfaced through gesture, silence, and presence.

A photography of encounter
My practice does not begin with an image in mind.
It begins with a meeting.
The camera is not a tool of capture but of relation: it connects, protects, creates distance, and allows closeness. Looking through the viewfinder, I step aside from the noise of the world. Something quieter emerges.
A shared rhythm.
A fragile trust.
Photography, here, is an act of attention and care.

Objects, traces, and what remains
Photographs were taken in homes, hospitals, and meaningful places—spaces inhabited not only by people, but by memory.
Objects appear as silent witnesses:
a bag filled with farewells,
a pendant carrying names,
a prayer mat,
a photograph sent from afar.
For those who migrate, objects are not neutral. They hold threads—between past and present, absence and presence, loss and continuity.
To lose them is sometimes to lose a part of oneself.

I chose hands
During the pandemic, faces disappeared behind masks.
Hands did not.
Hands that heal, that examine, that reassure.
Hands that write, that wait, that tremble.
Hands that carry lives—and sometimes, the weight of them.
They were feared as vectors of contagion.
They became distance.
And yet, they remained what they have always been:
our first tools of care.
In this documentary photography project on COVID-19, I chose to photograph hands as one would photograph a face—seeking expression, identity, and truth.
Because hands reveal what words cannot.
Because hands remember.
Because hands take care.

Between documentary and cinema
The visual language of the project borrows from cinema.
Healthcare workers appear not as distant figures, but as protagonists—complex, luminous, sometimes fragile. Not heroes as myth, but as presence.
Through layered compositions—gestures, spaces, fragments of life—the work resists simplification. It insists on human complexity.

Towards an inclusive gaze
This project questions how we see—and how we value.
Can a person be reduced to a function, a role, a profession?
Or can we learn to recognize what exceeds it:
histories, attachments, invisible struggles, quiet strengths?
To look differently is already to begin changing.