Morgane is a prizewinner of the Rencontres Photographiques des Amis du Musée Albert-Kahn (2022) and received a creative grant for her work “Réparer”.

What is your artistic background ?
Thanks to a family environment in which it was always present, photography has always been a vector of memory for me, a formidable object allowing me to not forget anything. As a child, I used to draw a lot, and I keep from that time a pronounced taste for contemplation and wonder. As a teenager, the camera became my favorite tool and I threw myself entirely into this passion. Without a shadow of a doubt, I wanted to make it my profession. At Septantecinq, a school of visual arts in Brussels, I learned how to transform the memory-image into a witness-image, how to tell a story with sincerity and implication. After my studies, however, it is primarily commissioned photography that will occupy me.
In September 2018, my vocation caught up with me, and I then started documentary research around issues that affect me. These pushed me to fly to Kinshasa to meet Nzusi, Rosette, Mambuta and some other Congolese women, all suffering from fistulas and waiting for care. This trip transformed me. I brought back the first chapter of Réparer—a series for which the Porosus Fund is supporting me—and the certainty of being where I should be. Since then, I have focused on France, and my work has been encouraged by the awarding of prizes and residencies. Today and in each of my subjects, I deal with the intimate while raising social and political issues. This approach reflects my desire to produce a sensitive and committed photography, and to meet others, always placing the human being at the center of my approach.

What is your view of your profession today ?
It is a multifaceted and constantly changing profession—there are as many conceptions of photography as there are photographers, tools in constant evolution, and images everywhere, but not always relevant. So, I believe that it is our duty as professionals to inscribe ethics into our practices and to constantly question them. In my opinion, these days are marked by the advent of a new activist, feminist and embodied photography, and that's good!

How do you see yourself in 5 years ? In 10 years ?
In the next few years, I want to succeed in reconciling documentary projects and press portraits, transmission workshops and commissioned reports for media and clients whose ideals I share, especially from an ecological and social point of view. I would also like to turn to book production—my first book will be published by Filigranes and Zone I in 2023, for the Terre & Territoires collection, and I hope it will be followed by many others. In the medium term, I wish to deepen my knowledge in image education, but also to resume my studies and to train in Art Therapy, to go further with the beneficial impact that photography can have on each person. Finally, in the much longer term, I dream of leaving the city for good and participating more actively in the decentralization of culture.

 

Interview conducted in 2022
Photography credit: Julie Glassberg