On 26 December 2004, Ambroise Tézenas photographer was on holiday in Sri Lanka, where a massive tsunami swept across South East Asia. While he was on the heights of the island, a crowded train was washed away, below, drowning hundreds of people in a torrent of water and mud. The photographer, survivor, spent a week surrounded by death, among families searching for loved ones amid corpses and totally devastated landscapes. A trying experience, revived a few years later during a discovery on the Internet: "I have noticed myself that it had been kept lying now, and he had become a place to visit, says photographer on the phone. There was such a lag ... I wondered what drove people to come to the place where I saw all these dead children, that they were seeking there. »
Ambroise Tézenas then embarked, on its own, in a photographic project scope around the site became famous and popular because of the tragedy they sheltered - natural disaster, killing, battle ... With the development of mass tourism, the sites offered to the morbid curiosity of the public have increased. The Anglo-Saxons even have a name for this contemporary form of travel: the "black tourism" (dark tourism), which encompasses both the Ground Zero site in New York, the Pont de l'Alma in Paris that Auschwitz - visited annually by more than 1 millionde people. In France, one hesitates to append ...