00:00What I just hope is that people will look at people on the street just saying hello,
00:05just considering them as human beings. I mean that would be a huge achievement for me.
00:18There are a lot of photographs about homeless people in the street.
00:21But the thing is we see them in the street, dirty, with a lot of hair,
00:26or manned, and sometimes lost, drugged, in a condition that makes us very distant from them.
00:36Because we see a homeless person. We don't see a human being.
00:41So what I decided to do is, by going in those shelters, go beyond this label
00:46and to discover who those people were. And when you see them shaved, with a shirt,
00:52like you and me in fact, then suddenly the distance is not that far and you start talking
00:59with them and discover that they may be much wiser than you think they are, and much wiser than you and me.
01:06I didn't want to do just snapshots. So what I did is that I set up a studio light environment
01:24and we stayed together one hour, two hours, until I could feel that they gave me something
01:31that they didn't give to a lot of people. And I think that when we are maybe struck
01:36by those portraits, because at the end I think we see ourselves,
01:40we don't just see homeless people, we see ourselves.
02:02What I decided to do is to go there every day, so that they were used to me,
02:08and at the beginning without a camera. Then progressively they abandoned, I would say,
02:14their defenses and they started to be more authentic. And this is just at this moment
02:20that I started to take them in pictures. I thought it was very important to know them first.
02:27And I think this is why it has been pretty successful. Now I found it's much more complex
02:32than I thought. It is a label that we have to go beyond. I think I was feeling, as anyone,
02:40superior to those people we see on the streets. We feel we are lucky, we are the smart ones,
02:45we are the rich ones, but in fact they may be wiser than what you think. I recognized myself
02:52in many of the weaknesses and what they were expressing in a very authentic way.
02:58So when you dare to look at those people the real way, when you really see them,
03:05you start seeing yourself. And I think this is a huge insight.
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