Portrait

Driving in Los Angeles is more than just a matter of transportation. It's a culture and a way of communicating to the world that you are alive and have success. For many people the car's become such an important part of their life, to be considered as a natural member of the family. Few cities can say that a large part of their design and identity are due to the highway network.
Los Angeles can.

Between the first signs of spring and the first snow of winter, demolition derbies flourish throughout the province of Quebec, Canada. Largely concentrated in the summer season, more than thirty of these events take place each year. Most demolition derbies happen in rural regions, and are often featured at the heart of town festival line-ups and agricultural fairs.

As soon as you think that you know all of the superheroes and the bad guys, the evil and the good create new avatars... Here are more super belgian wrestlers coming out of local comic books. Find out more on this job: www.phototvdd.be

10 p.m. in a crappy sport facility of the industrial belgian city of Charleroi. The wrestling show is over... For them it was a success... "Around 350 spectators. That's almost the double of last show". Well wrestling is not that popular yet in Europe. We are faraway from the superstar of the WWE. Some will even say here that they are not athletes but more some kind of "phénomène de foire". Well one think is sure, for the few kids that were a few minutes ago on the first row, the guys are heroes.

Early Sunday morning in a small Belgian village… Ladies with a smile always plastered on their face. Men tanned as bodybuilders that swell out their chest with pride and defiance. Too serious kids that doesn’t fit well in their tuxedo. Ice skating dresses but without the skates and the ice. Foxtrot, waltz, tango… Chacha, rumba, mambo… Dance here is a serious matter! And nobody seems to care that the competition takes place in a crappy sport center. Early Sunday morning, most of us are still sleeping.

Mozambique resembles a long, outstretched beach supported with jungle towards the inland. To tourists, those seductive beaches with their diving areas clear as glass are well known. Less familiar to the exotic treasure hunters are the parts of the beach occupied by the local population. I smelled the different scents and tried to observe as intensely as possible, to be able to portray that other reality of no-go zones for the tourists, where there is only space for fishing boats, where people sell fish, dump things or pray to an ocean god.

My relationship with the sea comes to me since I was little. My father was merchant marine captain and I have always had a very direct relationship with the sea, I know make sailors knots, which is starboard and where is the ship's keel. For me the sea is a large expanse of water roads, my father was a “trucker” in the sea, he carrying goods from one place to another and that was the source of life for everyone in my family.

This is one image from a large body of work documenting the people and environment of Sao Tome and Principe, two small islands 290 kilometers west of Gabon. Once a super power of production and export of coffee and cocoa created by the Portuguese in colonial times. The country gained independence in 1975. Since then, the grand plantation estates and its' houses have been re-claimed by the jungle, trees grow through the roof tops of grand old buildings. Various estates have become little villages where the locals have claimed the buildings for them selves.

Odessa has always been one of those mystical cities. Each summer its beaches attract thousands of Eastern European vacationers. I have spend my summer there. Lost in the tranquility of all this water. http://www.matthieuraffard.com/