Martine Barrat is an artist who photographs how she breathes, she sees, she feels, she participates, and at the same time she knows how to make herself forgotten to grasp the truth of her subjects.

It is her passion and her job, to which she has dedicated her life. Through her photos, through her videos, she excites us and enchants us, she has always had the gift of feeling at home and being accepted right away in the environments where she is inserted. She also knows how to work in continuity. Thus in the Goutte d'Or district that she has been traveling since 1982, every time she comes to Paris from her New York lair where she has made her friends from the Bronx and Harlem live for so long through her photos. Her portraits - because among other things she likes portraits, individual, for two or in groups - reflect the naturalness of the characters and their truth, not hers. This is how she makes us live, at their own pace, the people of the neighborhood, night and day, at the cafe, with family and in their games. Because she has a special gift for sharing with us the intimacy between a mother and her daughter, Mohamed who helps old Mrs. Lulu to cross, and especially the happiness of children, whatever their living conditions: smiling, worried, sneering, thoughtful, screaming with life in all seasons.

They play, with sparkling eyes, in the courtyard, on the stairs, in the street, with a smashed armchair or old cardboard boxes, or on a precious bicycle, and also on a field that has become a football paradise for the occasion. These rainbow children, we also see them grow up, like her friend Mamadou whom she has known since childhood - on the wooden horse found in the street - and who succeeded in life where he embarked on humanitarian projects; we also see them aging, like the Germa parents, their five children and the old grandmother just arrived from Algiers. The young people are also there, to be devised in the street, or the big brother who scolds his younger brother. Her secret is that she loves them all, the young Mamadou, the old temmes, like the teenage girl whose last day without a veil, her friend Malika or the young and melancholic Sylvie who died of an overdose, or Mamadou's father surrounded by his two wives. The photographer's tenderness emerges from her most heartbreaking images at times, but also the most joyful. This work by Martine Barrat is, at the Goutte d'or as elsewhere, a great and beautiful lesson in humanity.

Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch

Professor Emeritus, University Paris-Diderot Commander of the Legion of Honor