Only God Can Judge Me

Matthieu Gafsou was immersed in Lausanne’s drug scene for more than a year. By using various formal approaches, he prosaically and at the same time emphatically documented the life of addicts. His dignified portraits of longtime drug abusers with their sharp-featured faces stirringly personalize a social problem. With still lifes he captured their contradictory living environment.
Hard documentary close-ups of drug packets, drug paraphernalia, aseptic drug consumption rooms, surveillance cameras, etc. provide a direct impression of the addicts’ daily struggle for survival. By contrast, Gafsou’s poetic photographs of the scene’s nocturnal showplaces allow viewers to intuit the desirable sides of the high. (Tutsek Stiftung)