Welcome My Friend

Gilles Raynaldy’s second photo book, Welcome my Friend, retraces an experience in the “Calais Jungle” during the nine months preceding the evacuation of the refugees in October 2016. About eighty analogue photographs (in colour and black and white), as well as extracts from his diary, constitute a sedimentary memory. The book unfolds like a film, to the rhythm of her wanderings and the passing of the seasons: little by little, the photographs become impregnated with a place that we discover through the actions, gestures and looks of the people who lived there and with the environment that is revealed around them. The writer Marielle Macé sheds light on the photographer’s approach, his non-intrusive presence, his attention to spaces, encounters, ways of living, gestures of hospitality. The anthropologist Michel Agier recalls the urban forms and social uses that were invented in the Jungle and whose lessons are still relevant today.

Gilles Raynaldy’s photographic work deals with social issues, gestures, architecture and urbanism, using an empirical and empathetic method. His first book, Jean-Jaurès (Purpose éditions, 2015), dedicated to a school in the Paris suburbs, has been nominated for several international awards.