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Titouan Lamazou: His vision of women around the world

By Kimberly Conniff Taber Published: Thursday, November 1, 2007

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PARIS They all have stories to tell. Marina, the abandoned wife of a Taliban commander imprisoned in Guantnamo, Cuba. Tima, a young fisherwoman on a minuscule Indonesian island. Azza, a gynecologist in Gaza who refuses to wear the veil. Cassia, a high-class prostitute in So Paulo. Dayu, a Balian princess.

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These women are all the subjects of portraits by Titouan Lamazou, a French photographer and artist, who spent six years traveling the world to record women's stories in words and images. An exhibition of his project, "Femmes du Monde" (Women of the World), is showing at the Muse de l'Homme here until March 30. Before he became a full-time artist, Lamazou, 52, was a solo navigator, winning the Vende Globe, a nonstop solo sailing race around the world, in 1990. "I quickly learned that borders between countries didn't make sense, that they were a false reality," he said in an interview. "What interests me more are

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were a false reality," he said in an interview. "What interests me more are people, and among people, women." So after publishing several artistic journals of his earlier travels, he took his cameras and his paintbrushes and set out on an ambitious campaign. He began in the Horn of Africa in 2001, and ended in Mauritius early this year, for a total of 15 three-month trips on five continents. Along the way, Unesco named him an "artist for peace," which he said helped him gain access to more sensitive areas as he continued his travels. The results of his journey are glimpses into the lives of 230 women. "Painting portraits of today's women is more representative of the evolution of our societies than painting their companions, who have been lording over them since the beginning of time," Lamazou writes in an introduction to the project. The portraits are displayed in what Lamazou calls his "tableaux" - large-scale collages with sketches, paintings, landscape photographs and portrait photographs that together communicate his vision of each woman. They are also collected in a two-volume, 992-page set and a smaller catalogue version published by Gallimard, and in 50 four-minute profiles produced by and being shown on the public television station France 5 (and also available on DVD). Lamazou's multi-format approach gives his work an extra dimension. "He's someone who won't be reined in by categorization, who won't be put into a box," said Vincent Beaurin, who designed the exhibition with Lamazou. In the portraits of Blessing, a Nigerian migrant, for example, there is a striking black and white photograph of her looking into the camera with an unapologetic stare. In a painted sketch, her features are softer, a bit world-weary. Two large-format photographs add more layers to her story: Blessing sleeping on a straw mat in a windowless room; Blessing walking down a sand-covered road with concrete block houses. An accompanying text tells of her odyssey through Algeria, Morocco, Mali and Senegal before landing in Mauritius, all in a futile attempt to make it to the Canary Islands and on to Europe. Many women she traveled with, she told Lamazou, paid their way by sleeping with men. As Lamazou put it: "The photograph says what the text doesn't, and the sketch

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says what the photograph doesn't. There'd be no point in doing it a different way." Lamazou often traveled to places scarred by war or mired in extreme poverty, and his portraits can tell painful stories: of refugees in Darfur, the "untouchables" in India, prostitutes in West Timor. But overall the sense they give is not one of desperation, but of fortitude. "He has both an artistic and a sociological view of these women," said Batrice Dautresme, the head of the L'Oral Foundation, which was a major source of funding for the project. "His humility is transparent in the way he draws them. He doesn't give lessons, he doesn't make any judgments." Take Marina, the wife of a Taliban commander. In a large-scale photograph taken in Kabul, she and another woman are covered from head to toe in pale blue burkas set against a completely gray background of tanks and ruined buildings. But other portraits show her playfully peeking out from behind her veil, or in the doorway of her home, smiling serenely, head uncovered.
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