Little-known corners of the world have always fascinated Jean-Baptiste. As a teenager, armed with his camera, he travelled extensively in West Africa. Here he realised the great potential for his camera to be used as a window into the lives of others. Thus, he became deeply committed, not merely to seeing a country and taking snapshots to capture its aesthetic beauty and charm, but to acquire a deeper knowledge of the people and lands he photographs. Despite his early experience and professional training, Jean-Baptiste did not start his career as a full-time photographer until 2006 when, with very little notice, he left his native France and moved to Eritrea. Political paranoia and restrictions create challenges for a photographer in Eritrea. However, his photographer’s profession meant that people he met were willing to give him a unique insight into their lives as well as their history, politics and traditions. By scraping below the surface, he was able to tell a person’s story by capturing their face, and by photographing their surrounding traditions and heritage he could tell a tale about their history and culture. Jean-Baptiste moved away from Eritrea as suddenly as he arrived. After six months of living in Eritrea he decided to visit France, but to stop in Yemen en route. He never left. Here he found a subject for his art and an outlet for his imagination. Once again, he was able to use his profession to travel beyond a land of postcards, to discover another Yemen. His first three exhibitions in Sana’a, ‘Errances sur le 15ème Parallèle’ (2008), ‘Elle, regards croisés, il’ (2008), and ‘Visa for Yemen’ (2009) showed sites commonly visited by tourists alongside his discoveries beyond. He quickly became one of the best known photographers in Yemen. His carefully thought through photographs and professional working methods have made him heavily in demand by international organisations, many of which now depend on him for publicity and to create photo reports about their work in Yemen. His photographs have been printed in various articles and publications including Altermondes, Rue 89, RFI Musique, Yemen Oberver and Yemen Today. In February 2010, Jean-Baptiste held his first exhibition of art photography in Sana’a, ‘Opposition’. This exhibition aimed to show the stark contrast between the traditional and the modern, as well as the visible and the invisible Yemen. He did this by displaying photographs of industrial sites alongside photographs of tourist sites. The common vein running through the entire series was his experimental technique of laying photographs of alabaster over the images, changing the viewers’ perspective of what they were seeing. Jean-Baptiste is currently working on a new project to show the beauty of Kuwait – a place many people associate only with money, concrete and sand. Text By Rebecca Tustin.
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Yemen: Fight For Basic Health
By Jean-Baptiste Lopez
Posted in all, features, greater middle east, slides on 12 October 2009
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Leaving a painful civil war in 1994, Yemen remains the poorest country in the Middle East. Both the political and social environment is extremely fragile and continues to hamper economic growth, which results in a partial absorption of the vital needs of populations. The poorest are the first victims of a health system that covers [...]