A photographic exhibition highlights the way social sciences look at disability – avoiding any miserabilism in the representation of vulnerability. Christian Baudelot visited it.
For twelve years, a small interdisciplinary team (sociology, anthropology, economics), led by Florence Weber and Agnès Gramain, has been working on family care for dependent people. The initial objective is to understand how people organize themselves to cope with the dependence of one of their loved ones in daily life, whether it is a dependent elderly person, a disabled person or even a very young children. This team, the Médips (Modeling of the Domestic Economy and Impact of Social Policies) has carried out, over the last twelve years, numerous investigations and published widely. She gradually extended her field of research to the professions of home help and the territorial dimensions of public dependency policies in France, then in 2010, to the analysis of the conditions for taking into account people’s points of view. dependent themselves.
The results of all these investigations are rich. The crossing of ethnographic, sociological and economic approaches gives the whole a great rigor and a lot of originality, because it is reality as it is, with its shadows and its lights, which is restored to us.
Drawing on its acquired experience and the wealth of knowledge developed over the last twelve years, the Medips team is today taking an important and very original step in making its results available to a wider audience: it is organizing a photo exhibition on one of the central themes of his research, Disability and Dependence. These photos are exhibited from May 3 until June 10, at all hours of the day, on the exterior facade of the new library building (NIR), at the École Normale Supérieure (entrance at 45, rue d’Ulm, Paris 5). The exhibition, free and open to all, is worth the trip. Each of the images constitutes in fact an object of meditation.
The author of these twenty photos is a young professional photographer, very well trained in the social sciences and familiar with the work of Médips in which he participated, as an apprentice sociologist, during his studies. His name is Jean-Robert Dantou.
This exhibition does not seek to arouse the viewer’s emotion through realistic images expressing the suffering, deprivation or loneliness of disabled or dependent people. A theatrical staging discourages any miserabilist reading. It can surprise you with its bias and its standardization. The protagonists give the impression of being captured, motionless, on a theater stage as the curtain rises. Time stands still, they pose. And nothing is arranged at random: the place of each person, their posture, the direction of the gaze, the contacts of the bodies, the furniture, the medical equipment are, for each of the twenty photos, the subject of a construction calculated in depending on the particular meaning of the situation. The standardization of the very successful staging in terms of colors and framing, however, leaves a lot of room for the diversity of cases. Although they share the same experience, they are all different. Men, women, the rich, the poor, the old, the very old, the young, people with Alzheimer’s disease, a blind person, a myopath, a head traumatized person, a person with cerebral palsy… Some live with them, others in nursing homes, homes, still others in specialized reception centers. Here linoleum and tiles, there parquet floors and carpets.
This image construction bias is not a photographer’s whim. It expresses the scientific attitude of the research group in relation to its object and the transformations it intends to promote in the treatment and status of disabled and dependent people.
Under the photo a small plaque indicates the place and setting of residence, the condition from which the person suffers but above all their first and last name. Explicit desire of the organizers of the investigation to treat them throughout and with their agreement as people: they have not lost their identity any more than those around them. Because they are never alone on the photo scene, but always surrounded by members of their family and nursing staff: physiotherapists, nurses, nursing assistants, sometimes doctors but above all by all these new staff in charge of dependent people: auxiliaries life skills, specialized educators, medical-psychological assistants. By placing dependent people and the staff who take care of them on the same level, the photographer reconstitutes a chain of humanity. Both are men and women in their own right. These images thus constructed break the spiral of contempt and relegation to which the former are often the object and which contagionly affects dependency and disability professionals.
Each of these photos deserves to be looked at closely if only because the number and quality of those accompanying them varies from one person to another as do the respective proportions of family members and health professionals. support. No less than twenty-four people surround a young 91-year-old lady who seems in top form. All are members of his family: no medical personnel appear on the plan. It’s the opposite in the photo after: seventeen professionals to surround a 93-year-old lady in an Ephad, but not the shadow of a family member.
The objective of this exhibition is very clear and explicitly formulated on a panel. By breaking a taboo, it is about transforming the image of dependence and disability at a crucial time for the redefinition of social policies. It is about breaking with miserabilist and compassionate images to reestablish social policies of solidarity which combine humanity and efficiency. May they be listened to: the spectacle they put on constitutes an effective plea for good listening.
Exhibition until June 10, 45 rue d’Ulm, Paris.