In an area that was once a producer of wealth and the custodian of skills which are today negated, the economic crisis has widened disparities to the point of shattering the hopes of a significant section of the young population. Former areas of industrial settlement have mutated into social car parks. Such territorial ghettos are mirrored in social ghettos. Without work, these young adults cannot find the solidarities that previous generations had learnt to create on the sites of production. Furthermore, an ideology which exalts earners tends to internalise failure and to increase withdrawal.

Together with his sensitive questioning of this reality, Bernard Joseph has developed a body of work which is at odds in its configuration. In the history of photography, there is a tradition of moraly commited photographers who reproduce suffering beings within their environment in a documentary-type style. Another, more taxonomic, trend, is conscioulsy or unconsciously based around the way in which power, through medicine and the police, has used photography since the 19th century to stalk social fringes.

Bernard Joseph has tried to restore a face to those who had lost it in individual and social crisis. The photographs, with their format, their layout, will seek more to kindle reading than awe. At each moment of this process, the notion of respect is manifest. Bernard Joseph refuses the objectification of the photographed subject and of anything which might cause the onlooker's fascination. Within this sorrow, Bernard Joseph reacts with the ethics and aesthetics of resistance, at human level.