Photographs from French photographer Samuel Gratacap’s series Empire(2012–14) will be projected on the windows of the ICP Museum at 250 Bowery, in conjunction with the current exhibition Perpetual Revolution: The Image and Social Change.
These images document refugees and migrants in Choucha, a refugee camp located in Tunisia, which receives hundreds of thousands of migrants, many fleeing the crisis in Libya or escaping conflicts in West Africa and Southeast Asia. In his attempt not to aestheticize or over dramatize the lives of the people he photographs, Gratacap has produced a powerful series of images that speaks to the heart of the current debate surrounding refugees and migration.
About Samuel Gratacap
Born in 1982, Samuel Gratacap graduated from the Marseille School of Fine Arts in 2010. In 2012 he was awarded a CNAP grant (aid fund for contemporary documentary photography) then the Le Bal-ADAGP Young Creation Prize in 2013. The work he carried out for two years in Tunisia in the Choucha refugee camp (2012–14) was displayed at a personal exhibition in Le Bal in Paris in 2015 and was published by Editions Filigranes. That same year he received a special mention from the jury at the Winterthur Fotomuseum Plat(t)form event as well as a work grant from the FNAGP (National Foundation for Graphic and Visual Arts) and from the agnes.b endowment fund for his project The Castaways (Libya) displayed at the Arab World Institute in Paris for the Biennale of Photographers of the Contemporary Arab World. Samuel Gratacap is a regular reporter in Libya for the newspaper Le Monde and he is represented by Galerie Les Filles du Calvaire in Paris.
