The Elegance of Fire

The world has become my country. I travel around it as a photographer and witness the way it drifts between war and peace. My home base is Paris, but I bear witness to the wounds of our humanity as a whole.
In 1987, I was invited to Baku and was very much looking forward to seeing the city. I knew that I would find an echo of my childhood there. This was my first time in Azerbaijan, and later I went there often, covering the decisive, tragic moments of the country’s history in 1990 and 1992 for the international media.
Over the following decades, I met people from the towns and the mountains as I walked across a country that I wanted discover and explore with my own eyes.
Azerbaijan, the Elegance of Fire is a visual and poetic journey, a pictorial witness of how the country is evolving, and of the variety and wealth of its ancestral cultural identity.