Reaching for Dawn
Elliott Verdier

The series Reaching for Dawn is an attempt to break the silence that prevails about the bloody war that Liberia experienced from 1989 to 2003. For two years, Verdier crisscrossed the whole country with his large-format camera, from the diamond mines of Gbarpolu to the fishing port of Harper, in order to create a visual testimony of the invisible traces of this tragedy, which even today stifles the country and its inhabitants. His documentary work is made up of dark deserted landscapes in black and white and portraits in colour which give a voice to the local populations. These two sequences of images are accompanied by audio testimonies by victims and perpetrators, who recount what they experienced. The images are intended to denounce the zone of shadows in which the country still remains, and to express the need for light to be shone on this catastrophe in order to begin a collective process of reparation.