Cédric Gerbehaye trained as a journalist. It is the desire to understand that drives him. When he travels to Palestine, the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan or Kashmir, he does so, he says, to « jump on the bandwagon of history », to see, above all, feel and document what is happening from the inside. He takes the time to observe territories and situations, and to listen to the people he meets. Testifying is an exchange; you must have seen to pass on. You must pay a lot of attention before you can pass on your experience. It’s about passing on the baton. To understand, you must immerse yourself. To last, to spend hours, days, years looking, to enter unfamiliar places, to follow their winding roads, to wait for the fog to dissipate, for trust to be earned. Then you can look straight ahead.

Cédric Gerbehaye is a visual storyteller. Before the image emerges, he tells why he is there, where he comes from and what he has seen. It’s because he tells his story that tongues are loosened and faces are opened. His images are condensed. They are full of the stories people tell him. He says that much more than the camera; his real tool is the body. His understanding comes through the body. He enters spaces, makes contact, shakes hands, shares bread. Whenever possible, he takes a photograph when he is touched by an encounter or a life experience. He also says that a portrait should be able to touch the viewer. The word is not too strong. The touch that the photographer talks about is both contact and emotion. The tactile and haptic dimension is very present in his photographs: we see gestures, lots of touching, contact with materials, encounters, contrasts, rubbing of textures. Particular attention is paid to skins and the appearance of surfaces. Roads, fabrics, epidermis worn, wrinkled, crumpled, stained, covered, repaired, tattooed surfaces. Everywhere traces of experience. Touch could be the central subject of his Zoonose series, produced between 2020 and 2022 during the pandemic, a period of social distancing. Illness, conflict, prison – many of his works, old and more recent, ask the question: how can we live without ties? Through his photographs, he says: this is what I have seen, heard and what moves me. Barthes said that which ‘points me out’. By this he meant what, in photography, ‘shoots out of the scene, like an arrow, and pierces me ’. An exchange of glances, an exchange of emotions. Something stops the photographer. So, he tries to capture what grips him: the intensity of a look, how events, wounds and ideas are expressed, silenced and take shape in the body. In La Peine, the film he has just made in the Forest and Saint-Gilles prisons in Brussels, he captures the movement, the emotions that run through bodies: the flutter of an eyelid, a shudder, a long breath, the energy, the contained violence, the weight of silence between two words. Cinema allows him to unfold what photography fixes, to delve into the depth of a situation and how it unfolds over time. It also allows him to extend the listening experience by capturing sound: to make the prison environment audible, the resonance of metal noises, the intonations of a voice, the singularity of an expression, the power of a song. Capturing the imperceptible, bringing to light these invisible lives, entrenched at the very heart of what anthropologist Didier Fassin calls the ‘shadow of the world ’. How can we stop without stopping, without freezing? Black and white, framing, composition, light and duration are his tools.

This is how the image in turn stops us, detaches itself, suspends the continuous flow of the visible for a while. Another follows. Cédric Gerbehaye likes to tell stories. The image is his language.

His choice of photographic subjects is often accompanied by a reflective approach. He says: ‘The link is the only hope today’. So, he photographs what links us to each other, to our territories, how our lives are caught up in the threads of history, what continues to bind us despite the conflicts that overtake us, the walls that separate us, beyond the technologies that distance and isolate us. He sees photography as a link. Its role is also to link us, to connect us. For him, as a photographer, it is also his responsibility to maintain this link, which is the glue that holds society together. ‘Without links, we dry up’, he says. Each shot is an encounter, the possibility of a shared journey. The image as a handshake, a hug, a comfort. The images that populate the inside of cells, the walls of homes in Bolivia or Belgium, the bedroom of a resident of Aumessas or those that adorn the clothes and skins of prisoners as well as the inhabitants of Sète, Hainaut or the Cévennes, all have the same function: to link them to the world, to their past and to their dreams. The image is a link.

In today’s world, taking the time to meet people, to think about their relationship with others and the place of each individual is social work. In this sense, Cédric Gerbehaye is part of the history of social photography which, since the beginning of the twentieth century, has set itself the goal of bearing witness, shedding light on and contributing, in some small way, to changing points of view. Photography is as much an end as a means. When Marc Pataut, a photographer of relationships if ever there was one, starts work, he knows that it can last a long time. So, he is careful to specify: ‘I’m not here to photograph you, I’m here to make a photographic work with you ’. Cédric Gerbehaye could make these words his own. He knows when he’s starting a job, not when he’s going to finish. It’s a process. It’s the situation itself, what happens with those whose paths he crosses, that tells him it’s finished. Like the American documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman, who is a model for him, he immerses himself completely, making lots of images, filming a lot, before constructing a narrative that can give substance to what has been experienced. To do this, he selects from his photographs, documents himself, looks at other images, consults archives, then puts them together, thinking about the echoes and interconnections between them. Photographer Maxence Rifflet asks, ‘How do you frame without confining?’ in reference to his recent work in several French prisons. It’s a question that applies to all photographic work. How do you find the right distance? How do you capture the shared experience? What form should it take so that it opens rather than closes?

Cédric Gerbehaye is a mediator: he creates social links and gives the people he meets the means to access representation. He fleshes out a reality that we would like to leave in the shadows, building up a memory against oblivion. In this way, his photography is a gesture of resistance. This is undoubtedly why the people he meets on his wanderings through the Cévennes have found their way back to him. In this land of welcome and resistance, in the heart of landscapes that blend harshness and gentleness, where the power of the elements is felt everywhere, where lonely and tortuous paths are drawn and crossed like the life paths of those who walk them, no doubt many of them will have recognised themselves.