The whole piece of work is based on copy.

“Unshowable” is a photography book without any photos.

Only the captions, next to empty frames,

tell the stories of children from different areas of the world.

They tell the reader what can't be shown in France,

for decency reasons or legal ones.

World Vision is an international NGO created in 1947 in order to help vulnerable children all over the world. It is quite famous in some countries, such as Australia or the USA, but it is not well known in France.

When it comes to advertising, the French branch of World Vision has low means. That is why in 2023, they wanted to run again the same low budget campaign as in 2022. But how do you run an ad campaign when you don’t have money for that?

You need to convince the media companies. And unfortunately, in France, World Vision was not the only NGO begging for free space. The charity market has begun highly competitive.

That is why the “Unshowable” book was conceived: as an awareness building tool. That is also why it used the same concept as the ad campaign: children see what we can’t be shown. It was sent to 44 media companies in order to help World Vision France to get more free space.

All over the world, today, millions of children are constantly surrounded by violence, death and suffering. These tragedies have been further exacerbated these last years, with the acceleration of global warming (which in Africa has led to an unprecedented drought, causing a dramatic decrease in water and food resources), as well as the intensity of devastating conflicts for civilian populations.

World Vision France wanted to sound the alarm on these crucial issues. Atrocities such as the rape of a child bride or the genital mutilation of a young girl. They also wanted to call for donations.

To reach that main goal, they needed free ad space. Because they could not afford it. So the primary goal was to convince the media companies to be generous with World Vision. We had to touch their hearts. In a context of weaker market and high inflation.

UNSHOWABLE

A photo book without any photos.

What a strange concept.

There is some kind of paradox there,

some absurdity.

The reason for that is sadly simple:

to look at these pictures

can be a traumatizing experience.

Even if it is essential for photojournalists

to witness this world’s atrocities

in their own way,

not showing everything

is common decency.

In order to protect you,

we have cloaked every scene,

page after page.

These pictures are unshowable,

real nightmare visions.

And yet, children are witnessing them

every day, on all 5 continents.

They are the reason why

we have been committed

to alter their destiny since 1947.

Thanks to your help,

we have already changed

the lives of millions of them.

Thanks to your help,

we have been able to change

the way they see the world.

Corpse of a child in a cobalt mine

Africa, May 2019

A miry fog has drowned the gallery.

When the corridor structure gave away,

an ocean of red dirt was released.

The only proof for human presence

before everything collapsed

is a small hand,

apparently spared by the mud.

It has surfaced

like the arm of a drowning man

about to sink.

A child worked hard here,

enslaved by a greedy industry

hungry for rare metals.

The hand could ask us

in sign language:

“Wasn’t my life worth more

than a smartphone battery?”

But it won’t say a thing; in

a further collapse,

the dirt swallowed it up.

If you go down there,

it is more likely you will find death

rather than fortune.

And there is no need

for gravediggers

as the mine provides

the graves.

Wedding night of an 11-year-old child

Asia, March 2023

A picture conveys no sound.

Impossible, then, to hear the decibels

from the wedding dinner

which continues without the newlyweds.

An ironic term to say the least,

given that one of them is underaged

and the other one is her father’s age.

We cannot hear the bed squeaking

under the husband’s squeeze either.

Looking at the child’s appearance,

we can see she’s long past rebellion.

Nothing stands in the way

of the man’s desires now:

he fulfills them, like an animal.

The child doesn’t scream.

And yet, even if a picture

conveys no sound,

our eardrums are punctured

by those big eyes

that are crying out.

Rubble from a school hit by a missile

Northern Europe, February 2022

The building was ripped open.

It’s like a gigantic jaw took a bite out of the flank.

Creating a hollowness that now reveals

what was concealed behind the walls:

downstairs, we can see rows of child-sized toilets;

upstairs, there are desks and a blackboard

with some text, forever incomplete.

The dust has powdered the furniture

and turned faces into white masks.

Here, a woman’s trunk seems

to be looking for its torn-off legs.

There, two survivors are staggering around

like they’ve been through

several rounds of a boxing match.

Their eyes are filled

with fear and shock.

And the feeling that,

in this world,

nothing is sacred

anymore.

Baby who died from dehydration

Africa, August 2022

In an empty room

where everything stands still,

the mother’s stooped figure

stands out against the light.

Her child in her arms,

she continues to rock him

while moaning inaudibly.

As if holding him tight

could make him stay,

could keep him away

from death’s embrace.

But the baby remains livid.

He died from dehydration.

And the mother has no tears

to mourn him,

because she’s as dry

as he is.

Beheading of civilians by a child soldier

Africa, June 2021

In the background, an officer

with an imposing physique.

His face disappears behind dark glasses

and swirls of smoke from a cigarette.

He smokes it casually,

the way an office worker would.

In the foreground,

a man’s decapitated body.

The head has rolled up

to another man’s knees.

He’s being held down

by the threat of a machine gun.

Huddled up on himself

like cattle at the slaughterhouse,

he is shaking and waiting

for his time to come.

The machete,

dripping with darkblood,

is being held by

an unsteady hand.

The hand of a boy.

Which is more shocking

than anything else,

because he is barely 13.

Excision of a 5-year-old girl

Africa, Octobre 2023

This is not an operating room

but a cesspool

with a flicking neon light.

A man is standing

over a naked young girl.

In his thick hand,

a blade stained with red.

No trace of a syringe

anywhere, or any type

of anaesthetic.

It’s obvious the girl was cut raw.

Between her young thighs,

where the clitoris

was seconds ago,

there is now a pool of blood.

And on the child’s face,

we can see the pain

bursting out of her mouth.

Emaciated body of a child being buried

Africa, September 2022

The photo was taken at the end of the day

but the light is still unusually fierce.

It seems like it’s not casting shadows

but rather pining them down and quartering them.

On the left, a man is wielding a shovel with heavy arms.

Is it the weight of the weary land

that had to be cracked opened?

Or is it the weight of the men’s overwhelming misfortune

in this corner of the world

where the land is greedy?

It’s easy to guess what’s going on here:

a grave is being dug. A child’s grave.

The body lies next to it, wrapped in a shroud

lifted by the wind unchecked.

The corpse is skin and bones.

It is so emaciated that even the hyenas

would turn it away. In this heat,

even a small bite is too much effort.

A small comfort for the father,

burying his own son

stolen from him by famine:

the hungry fauna

will not dig him up tonight.

13-year-old prostitute in bed with a client

South East Asia, June 2023

In the foreground, illuminated

by red neon street lights,

a pair of loafers is waiting

for its owner to be finished.

A flower shirt sits on the back

of a brown wooden chair

and a pair of folded cloth trousers

lies on the seat.

In the background, there are

two masses of flesh

of dramatically

disproportionate sizes:

thirty kilos of ivory

violated by a hundred,

now out of breath.

We can see in the girl’s eyes

that she has given up,

because she knows

that tomorrow will be the same

as yesterday.

These are the eyes of those

who are ageless

even before

they have lived.

Those who will be sold

by a pimp for a few dollars

and one day,

only wrinkles or death

will come to set them free.

Woman drowning in front of her son

Mediterranean Sea, April 2023

The boat has rocked one time too many

and some of the migrants have fallen overboard.

The raging sea is about to swallow them up.

Among them, a blue spot is struggling in vain

in the dark water: it’s a woman.

She is looking at the little boy in the foreground.

He is looking at her too, his fists clenched.

At this precise moment, he’s no longer a child

but an allegory of distress,

of the powerlessness

to save the ones we love.

His mother is about to die

and in that final moment,

she’s only thinking of him.

It’s obvious what she’s trying

to tell him with her eyes.

She’s saying: “Survive, grow up

and become strong”.

Proving that the most beautiful

proof of love

can also be

the cruelest.

Orphan on asphalt

Northern Europe, March 2022

A frail body is lying on the asphalt.

Like Arthur Rimbaud’s Dormeur du Val,

he looks like he just dozed off.

Does he really have to wake up?

In this hell dug by artillery,

nothing looks familiar to him anymore:

shells have cut down trees,

destroyed gardens,

demolished the low walls.

In the street, they have created craters.

Ruins now stand where families once lived.

Seing him this peaceful,

the question arises again,

more than ever: does he really

have to wake up, only to discover

what war has taken from him?

Not only wood, stiles and stones;

not only the comfort of his own bedroom;

but those two people

lying just a few steps away,

whom he loved so dearly

and who will never

wake up.

15-year-old worker with late stage cancer

Asia, September 2023

What this photo wouldn’t tell you anyway,

is that neodymium is a silver-grey metal,

or what we call a rare earth metal.

At room temperature, it is ductile, flexible

and oxidises quickly if left out

in the open air too long.

Smartphone factories are very fond of it,

not to say voracious.

This photo wouldn’t tell you about

how meticulous the manufacturers are either,

while assembling the precious components

one by one in state-of-the-art workshops.

A clinical cleanliness, worlds away

from the acid lakes and radioactive landfills

created by dirty waste near extraction sites.

This photo portraits an emaciated child

with big empty eyes,

a child whose life has been extracted

at the the same time as we extracted ore.

And what this photo suggests above all,

is that in this corner of the world,

it is better to be a silver-grey metal,

a so-called rare earth metal

than a human being

with planned

obsolescence.

Agony of a child with pertussis

Africa, January 2022

It is not a family portrait anymore

but a mortuary painting.

One of these old-fashioned paintings

where faces were frozen into pasty masks.

The picture is literally plunging us into darkness:

windows are shut to spare the patient

from the harsh midday light.

Despite the grainy aspect of it

because of the half-light,

the snapshot leaves no doubt

as to the outcome of this battle:

the unstoppable coughing fit

is making the tiny body bend double

like the wind would snap a twig.

The parents, on either sides

of the makeshift bed, are also

bending over their child,

a futile gesture that seems to obey

the rules of classic paintings.

Seeing them like this,

so tense with their hands tied,

you wish it was only

a painting in a museum.

An artist’s vision.

So you could erase the weft

and with the tip of your brush,

give the child’s face its colours back.

But this is just a photograph.

This is reality.

And this is all the more tragic

when you think that

a dose of vaccine

would have been enough

to prevent all this.

Pre-teen girl raped in a gold mine

Africa, October 2021

In one picture, the dirtiest

and the most precious things

are combined: gold and mud,

childhood and abuse.

A man has pinned a young female worker

against the side of a crater.

With his trousers down to his ankles,

like an animal in heat,

he forces us to wonder

about the actual price

of a ring or a bracelet;

to ask ourselves how many carats

innocence is worth.

How many tears, screams

and nightmares will now

torment her every night.

This is the kind of unbearable picture

that exposes, without showing it,

the backroom of jewellery stores.

Behind the scenes of what seems

to be a gleaming business.

It forces you to see

what gold is too often made of:

virginal blood

dripping down

a raped girl’s thighs.

World Vision France is a member

of the World Vision International partnership

created in 1947. It has already helped

200 million children in over 100 countries.

It protects them from starvation,

water shortages, lack of healthcare

or education, war; even from customs

such as female genital mutilation

or forced marriage.

To find out more about

this non-profit organization,

visit worldvision.com

“Unshowable” is a book of “photography without any photos”. Only the caption tells what can't be shown for decency reasons and legal ones.

That is why we mainly used what is called “external focalization” in literature: everything is described as if we were merely looking at the scene.

Of course, each description is as meticulous as a photograph would be. The copy gives you all the details you would get from a picture.

Most of the time, we respect a kind of distance. It is a cold, sharp description. Nevertheless, here and there, we used a stylistic device, as an effect aimed at boosting the impact.

As another exception to our writing rules, from time to time, we also added some kind of extrapolations: what a viewer could guess or imagine while looking at the real picture. A way to make each copy more emotional.