Un Camp pour les bohémiens

A gallery of portraits. Young women and men, children, the elderly. Behind these portraits lies a terrible story: that of the Saliers camp, a concentration camp for nomads created in 1942 on the lands of the Camargue by the Vichy government, eager to “use it as a propaganda argument” and to give “a concentration camp the appearance of a village.” This is the silence that Mathieu Pernot breaks here, carrying out, as both photographer and historian, remarkable research on a forgotten camp. Drawing from the collection of administrative documents in the Departmental Archives of Bouches-du-Rhône, he brings to light the “anthropometric notebooks for nomads”: names, places and dates of birth, photographs, etc. From there, he was able to trace some of the Roma people who had been interned, collecting testimonies and capturing their images on film some sixty years later. These portraits speak of pain and horror across time. A salutary work of remembrance. —Céline Darner