Polaroids from Les Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, 2012.

In 2012, I travelled to Les Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, in the Camargue region of southern France, to photograph the annual Roma pilgrimage honoring Saint Sara.

I brought Polaroid cameras and Impossible Project film.

I did not want the work to feel polished, distant, or overly controlled. I wanted the photographs to carry something of the pilgrimage itself: movement, heat, devotion, uncertainty, and the fragile beauty of a moment that cannot be repeated.

Each May, Roma pilgrims gather in Les Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer to honor Saint Sara, venerated by many as the protector of the Roma people. The village fills with music, prayer, horses, candles, procession, and bodies moving toward the sea. It is public and deeply personal at once — part ritual, part reunion, part act of faith.

I came as an observer, but not as a tourist.

There are places where the camera must become more humble. The pilgrimage demanded respect. I was photographing a living tradition, not a spectacle. I was interested in the space between devotion and daily life: a hand holding a candle, a face turned toward the procession, the press of bodies in the streets, the sea waiting at the edge of everything.

The choice of Polaroid was not nostalgic. It was physical.

Every frame was singular. Every image had to be protected as it developed. Light, heat, dust, movement, and chance all became part of the work. Some photographs shifted in colour. Some carried imperfections. Some felt as if they had already aged by the time they appeared in my hands.

That fragility mattered.

The pilgrimage itself is built around memory, belief, and transmission. The Polaroid gave the images a similar quality. They were not only records of what I saw. They became small objects of witness — immediate, imperfect, and unrepeatable.

Saint Sara’s story belongs to legend, faith, and cultural memory. According to tradition, she is connected to the arrival of the holy women on the shores of Provence after a journey across the sea. Each year, her statue is carried through the streets and toward the water, surrounded by pilgrims who come not only to remember, but to belong.

What moved me most was not the drama of the procession, but the human intensity around it.

People came with grief, gratitude, hope, pride, and longing. Some came in silence. Some sang. Some watched from the side as if holding private histories no photograph could fully contain. I began to understand the pilgrimage not only as a religious event, but as a gathering of memory — a people carrying continuity through ritual.

These Polaroids are not documentary photographs in the conventional sense.

They are fragments.

A face. A gesture. A horse passing. A dress caught in movement. A figure emerging from light. The edge of a crowd. The feeling of standing close to something ancient and alive.

The work belongs to a thread that runs through much of my practice: the desire to witness people in moments where appearance gives way to presence. Whether in a village, a studio, a family home, or a sacred procession, I return to the same question:

What remains when the performance falls away?

In Les Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, the answer came through the instability of the medium itself. The Polaroid did not allow me to overwork the image. It asked me to receive it, protect it, and let it become what it would become.

In that sense, the process became part of the prayer.

The Roma Pilgrimage is a body of work about faith, impermanence, and the dignity of inherited ritual. It is about the way a community gathers around memory, and how a photograph — small, fragile, and imperfect — can hold the feeling of having been there.

Not as possession.

As witness.