From Greece to Germany: A Photo Documentary by Marie Dorigny on European Hospitality

Abstract

This chapter describes the presence of young children at the heart of photographic accounts of migration as a strategy to denounce the contemporary disappearance of the traditional social organisation that sees hospitality as a fundamental and sacred duty. And to do so it will first, question the photographic figure of the child as an emblem of distraught migrants. It will then analyse the role of the photographic process that has been used by the professional photographers to fabricate and present their migration and hospitality stories. The aim is to show that by mediating such an act, the photographer contributes to the contemporary deterioration of ancestral and theoretically unconditional hospitality, from individual to individual, to shielded, conditional and collective practice, delegated to institutions, local authorities and humanitarian organisations.The idea is to highlight the adequacy of the photographic medium to represent hospitality in its ambivalence while questioning its contemporary shift or qualitative transformation.