Night’s Flowers, 2001
This portrait series of transsexual people was realised in the street of Madrid in the summer of 2001. During several months, I followed a mobile unit of Médicos del Mundo in its night help and attention to prostitutes of Madrid’s program.
I choose to focus on the transsexual ones, those flowers of the night, which are subjected constantly to discriminations and attacks from a part of the population. What deeply stir me in these persons, is the expression of their face, their look particularly, which is rarely in keeping with words and gestures of their work.
In this look, we read too often an unspeakable distress, and a never ended exasperation. Those persons, with a whimsical and cheerful appearance, hide a vast loneliness. If they are, in group, “queens of the night”, on one’s own, they have the fragility of flowers, and have an extreme vulnerability. Tugging by this desire to have the other sex, since their youth, they fought all along their life to impose – or hide – their irreversible choice to their family and relatives. They are persons who decide to be woman, and want to live like that, even the cost is vast and excessive.
Those flower of the night are essential reflection of the Spanish capital, and are a strong part of its identity.
François Fontaine
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