Collages. From Africa with love. Le chien qui boit le thé

In the “From Africa with Love” series, the images overlap and blend like those of dreams. The real and the imaginary merge. Memories fade, reality shifts its shape, and physical and temporal boundaries dissolve.

From these superimposed layers emerge imaginary postcards of a West Africa that I began photographing more than twenty years ago. Documentary, reportage, and fiction intertwine. These accumulations, like geological strata, bear witness to the passage of time. Images, faces, and places eventually vanish, but their energy remains—alive, like in the depths of a voodoo fetish, nourishing the hidden substances within.

Sometimes, as in a dream, distant landscapes mingle with sirens and other magical creatures encountered along my path.

Photographed in Benin, Burkina Faso, Sierra Leone, Guinea, Mali, Nigeria, and Côte d’Ivoire