Exiles at the gateway to England: portraits of refugees in a suspended temporality

Between 2006 and 2020, French photographer and artist Bruno Serralongue (born 1968) conducted a prolonged engagement with the community of refugees on their last stop in a long journey to reach England. The resulting photographs, which formed the basis for an exhibition at Paris's Centre Pompidou in 2019, are published here for the first time.
Serralongue captured disparate moments in the lives of the exiles, their attempts to reach England and their provisional camps that were dismantled by the French government in 2020. Serralongue's images employ a suspended temporality that contradicts the sensationalized images broadcast by the mass media, recalling the visual traditions of history painting more than photojournalism.
The slowness of his photography, a characteristic of working with a view camera, requires both a distance from and a proximity with the subjects photographed, achievable only due to a relationship of trust built with the inhabitants of the "Jungle."