Disability & Dependency

The actors

> Research : the French elite university Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS) Paris-Ulm and the Chair at EHESP on Mental dependency and decision on someone else’s behalf.
> Photographer & sociologist : Jean-Robert Dantou.

Expectations

Contributing to the debate and improving the visibility and understanding of this major social issue. The project pursues two objectives : to reveal the social inequalities that disabled and dependent people face, and to portray the related diverse social & medical careers.

Bureaucrats - israeli, palestinian and foreign officials in peacemaking

Presentation / analysis
Visual production
Diffusion

The context

Public debate on dependency and disability focusses exclusively on financing. This political and media bias totally eclipses the question of the human cost facing dependent people, as well as their close family and friends.

Collateral Creations supervised a photographic project that portrayed the disabled person’s reconstituted entourage of professional carers and family.

The photographer Jean-Robert Dantou joined Florence Weber’s team in 2011. He puts into images the ethnographical and statistical results of her research into covering expenses related to dependent or disabled people’s needs, on both a family and professional level.

He met twenty such people, chosen in agreement with the team. He asked them to choose the people they would pose with, the group of people who help them in their daily lives. Twenty encounters bearing witness to some often difficult situations, overcome thanks to close friends and family as well as professionals. Twenty photographs that bear witness to the diversity of their situations, depending on the place of residency, home, establishment, sometimes a mixture ; according to their sex, class, age and the nature of their disability.

Behind this diversity lie the vagaries of demographics and family histories. To have, or not, a partner, children, parents, brothers and sisters… rallying round on a daily basis. But also the result of public policy for which territorial participation is complex : the establishments and home help available depends on national and local decisions, the result of numerous histories.

The project stems from a meeting between uncompromising research carried out as rigorously as possible, and a photographer wishing to explore the interface between science and society. It is part of a new wave of visual anthropology, paying particular attention to the image rights of the people being photographed

Images that could change society’s opinion on these private dramas and the political solutions on offer in France today.

Raising public and decision makers’ awareness of the contemporary hidden costs of paying for disability and dependence, by promoting the role of carers.