The Dead, The Killers & The Survivors

from the book-project “Exodus – 50 Million People On The Run”

1994, as the genocide of the Tutsis by the Hutu military began, I considered whether or not to travel to Rwanda to document the brutal fratricide. I decided to travel later and arrived there in April of 1995. I wanted to know what it is like in a country victimized by genocide. For me personally, it became a struggle with the question, “How do I photograph death, horror, the incomprehensible: the murder of almost one million people”. I visited the murderers in their prisons, photographed the identification of corpses pulled from mass graves and met with people in Rwanda, also refugees in Zaire (today Congo) and Tanzania. And what remains at the end of this struggle with this thematic, this reality, these pictures? It is beyond undertanding and for myself, since then, people have become a bit more terrifying.