Louis Witter is a French freelance photojournalist. Adventurer and resourceful since his high school, he gradually established himself as a specialist in exile and migrants, from Iraq to the city of Calais, in France, via Ceuta or Hungary. At 26, the young man assumes his rage in his stomach and his freedom to inform.
The young photojournalist waits on the terrace of a Parisian troquet, cap screwed on his head, his fluffy aviator coat on his back, far too hot for the time. A film camera basks in the sun. It heats up at the same speed as its beer, while its owner greets us. Louis Witter returned to Paris for a few days to see his family, before leaving to cover the work of associations in Calais, in the north of France, where migrants who hope to reach England flock every day. One of the many frontiers he covered in ten years in the field.
Plunged into intolerance
Leaving from the south of France at the age of 16 with his military father and his family to live in Paris, Louis discovers the city of light… and its tear gas. No more passionate than that by his final year, the high school student regularly skips class to cover the demonstrations against the opening of marriage to people of the same sex, which are gaining momentum. ” I lived in places where I could meet some fachos. I really wanted to understand how overnight you become so intolerant of people, which leads you to want to forbid two people to marry you. And in general, it went hand in hand with enormous racism “, he describes, cigarette in beak, the jaded air.
His photos earned him a finalist in the competition for the best student photo reportage at Paris Match. He does not win the prize, but earns the hatred of certain far-right activists, who are waiting for him downstairs to threaten him… photos of a media when you are not working on it.
On the roads of exile
A literary baccalaureate in the jacket (“ that I had very moderately, even very very very moderately “), the young man enters a school of journalism. It was there that he discovered the refugee camps of Marx Dormoy, north of Paris: “Thehe response from the town hall of Paris and the response from the prefect at the time and from the government, which was a left-wing government, was very repressive: we arrived at 6 a.m., and we expelled these people from their tent, without any proposal for relocation, with nothing. I didn’t understand what was going on. »
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With the money from the sale of a few photo prints, he takes his grandmother’s car and sets off on a 6,000 kilometer journey on the roads of exile, with a cameraman friend. He is 20 years old, and discovers that in Serbia, Hungary, Austria or Germany, the reception conditions for migrants are different, but never positive. ” I realized that the European countries did not welcome in the same way, but that in any case they welcome very badly, there is no opening on this subject of a Europe which nevertheless in his discourse calls itself a land of welcome. »
Precarious resourcefulness
So the young journalism student moves, as much as possible. His eyes come alive, his arms wave when he recounts his wanderings. Two days after the November 2015 attacks in France, he leaves without warning his school in Iraq with two comrades to meet the Kurds who have taken over a territory occupied by the self-proclaimed Islamic State (IS). A month of preparation to contact correspondents and Kurds in France to obtain passes. The experience confirms him in his desire for meetings, even if he is aware of the dangerousness of his approach: ” I realize the immaturity of the approach, in the sense that you leave at 20 years old… The stories were not necessarily constructed, we have lots of photos and texts that tell lots of little things, but we don’t There was no story to speak of on that camp. Today, it is he who is contacted to intervene with young budding journalists, to prevent them from going into the field without precautions.
The following year, still at school, he filmed migrants occupying a ferry in Calais. His images are taken up by major television channels. The sum allows the photojournalist in training to go on a five-month internship in Lebanon, without having to worry about working on the side. After his school, Louis spent two years in Morocco to become a correspondent. He travels to Ceuta, the Spanish enclave on the African continent.
There, he photographs and exchanges with young, isolated migrants: “ They lived in total misery, were between 12 and 17 years old… Minots who fall into the glue, others who are looking for odd jobs, still others who are trying to go to Europe, kids who still have their schoolbags on my back… that made me ask myself a lot of questions about our reception conditions. Finally, he returned urgently, for lack of resources: photojournalism pays poorly, photos often paid for months after publication. The coronavirus does not help.
Migrants in the lens
So on his return from Morocco, Louis Witter goes back and forth to Calais, which he had already covered before leaving for Morocco. Finally, it is over there that he finds his place, in the middle of this ” city in the city “, of those migrants desperately trying to reach the coast opposite. The peak of the 2016 migration crisis has passed, the shantytown has been evacuated and the major media have left Calais to take an interest in other news. But the police are still patrolling, regularly stopping the associations to check them and evacuating some of the migrants scattered in camps here and there every 48 hours, who come back tirelessly, despite fatigue and hunger, despite disturbed sleep.
At the dawn of the presidential election, a little thread on Calais, a French border town where the law is so often flouted by the state and where violence has unanimously been directed against exiles and those who help them during this quinquennium ⤵️ pic.twitter.com/plqBDZKh9v
— Louis Witter (@LouisWitter) April 7, 2022
It’s him and his colleaguewhich prove that migrant tents are torn apart by workers from cleaning companies supervised by the police. But the French Minister of Justice and that of the Interior deny. ” Dupond Moretti [Garde des Sceaux, NDLR] got angry, saying something like “how can we suggest that the tents be cut with a knife?”, Darmanin [ministre de l’Intérieur, NDLR] : “no, it’s not us”… and the next day, deportation to Grande-Synthe. I have the same draws from the knives in the tents. It’s still crazy to think that two Ministers of State, in important positions, manage to deny factually documented things for a year, and on several occasions. »
Since then, the cleaners no longer cut the tents. But the associations are still controlled or even fined regularly, because they distribute water and food to migrants in streets where it has been forbidden to do so for a year and a half. The photojournalist continues his work: “ This job is not fundamentally useless, but my vision of journalism has changed since school. I had a somewhat erroneous vision of what journalism can or cannot change. Being the little pebble in the shoe of Darmanin and Dupont-Moretti in that corner makes me very happy. »
Report what touches him
Louis Witter contrasts with these adventurous photojournalists who spend their time rolling mechanics, who run from one hot spot to another crossing the globe. If he has all the paraphernalia to be part of it, from the bomber jacket to the camera slung over his shoulder, he questions this way of working. What he saw in Calais suits him more. Far from defending sanitized journalism, weighed down with social distancing, he likes the idea of journalism that lives its subject: “ When you’re in other countries, it’s easy to go and deal with a subject, to tell people’s lives without being at home. There, the question of Calais, of the reception in Paris, it involves you a little more as a journalist because you tell yourself that it’s at home that it’s happening, it’s my taxes that finance the 2 000 cops mobilized daily in Calais. »
Guilt creeps in, too. Louis has kept in touch with Akam, an Iraqi Kurd who was dragged out of his lacerated tent and lives in Scotland. ” He tells me : “We fought Daech, France was our allies, we smoked these people for you and I go into exile and that’s how they treat me, they pitch my tent and they throw me like a Messy? That’s nonsense.” It pisses you off even more. ‘Cause now he’s in Scotland, he’s working [travaille]he has a girl, he has his apartment, everything is going well while he was in the tent, like a dog, in the cold. “For the future, he does not prefer to project himself too much. He will leave Calais in August, knowing full well that he will be there regularly, and will settle in Paris. What he hopes above all is not to find himself too quickly blocked behind a desk.
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