About
A boy stepped in front of my lens, and he was right to.
I am a French photographer living in Douala. I work in black and white, on portraits and on the street, and I am trying to gather proof of one simple idea: our diversity is the best thing about us.
Douala, Cameroon. The boy who stepped in.
The picture that settled it
Douala, a few days before Christmas. I was at an orphanage with my Toastmasters club, there to photograph the visit. I raised the camera towards a small boy. Out of nowhere another child stepped in front of him, finger up, eyes straight down the lens, standing guard over his friend. He was knee high and completely in charge. I have made sharper pictures. I have not made a truer one.
Twelve years old, and a one way ticket
I left France for Turkey at twelve and I never really stopped. Iran, Peru, Thailand, and a long list after them. My father photographed our family, and watching him do it I picked up a camera. For twenty years I made travel pictures without asking anything of them.
Then I became a father
The question changed. Not what did I see, but what am I leaving. I moved to black and white that same year. Colour is the first thing the eye takes and often the last thing it remembers. Remove it and what stays is texture, shape, contrast, nuance. Black and white does not flatten our differences. It is the only way I know to show them.
What the road taught me
I have been welcomed into enough houses to say this plainly. We want the same things: safety, work, someone waiting at home. We could have been identical. Instead we have traditions, faces, ways of looking. That difference is not a problem to be solved. It is the reason the world is worth photographing.
Two gestures, never confused
A portrait starts with a conversation. I speak first, I explain, and I make the picture only if the person wants it made. That is the 85mm. Street work is the opposite: I walk, I watch, I wait, and the moment comes or it does not. That is the 35mm. The camera is beside the point. The lens is not, because it decides how close I stand.
Weekdays, and the rest
During the week I run business for Central Africa in a pan-African group. It moves me around the region and it opens doors a holiday never would. On Saturdays I take one lens and walk. One day I would like to live and travel from this work, with exhibitions, publications and books. Until then nobody pays for these pictures, which means they owe nothing to anyone.
Florian Huguenin, Douala