THE LAND OF THE PURE
On 27 December 2007, Pakistan’s Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was assassinated in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. Stuck in traffic in her taxi on the way to a rally organised by this opponent of Pervez Musharraf, Sarah Caron found herself at the heart of one of the most tumultuous periods of the Islamic republic’s history. A month earlier, she had landed a commission for Time magazine with a scoop: an interview and photo shoot with Bhutto, who was then under house arrest.
On 27 December 2007, Pakistan’s Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was assassinated in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. Stuck in traffic in her taxi on the way to a rally organised by this opponent of Pervez Musharraf, Sarah Caron found herself at the heart of one of the most tumultuous periods of the Islamic republic’s history. A month earlier, she had landed a commission for Time magazine with a scoop: an interview and photo shoot with Bhutto, who was then under house arrest.
If you think that it all sounds like something out of a novel, you’d be right. In fact, she has turned it into a graphic novel. However, the story of this leading French press photographer began long before the events of 2007. Her first images taken in India depicted the exile of widows in the north of the country and earned her an exhibition at Visa pour l’Image in 1999. It was then that Caron, who was destined to become a ballet dancer, fully embraced photography and journalism. With an approach that is always sophisticated and never sensational, she is quick to cover the most interesting subjects – the ones we don’t talk about enough.
Her lens goes wherever her journalistic instinct guides her, but she does most of her work in Pakistan, where she has lived for the past 15 years. She shares variations on a country of which we are often shown only the worst aspects, a country that she has crossed from west to east and north to south, from the teeming metropolis of Karachi to the foothills of the Hindu Kush. This is a retrospective of her work, bringing us closer to the women and men who populate this singular nation.
LARGE OAK TREE