This one-minute video overviews my project ‘Immigrant Song” which questions what it means to be uprooted.

During Trump’s administration, the inhumanity of the United States policy against immigrants has aroused my anger. As an immigrant to this country myself, it has inspired me to create this project.

I started “Immigrant Song” with diptychs including the portrait of an immigrant and a still life of the arrangement he or she made with four stones. The underlying idea was to shoot a double portrait, figural and abstract: one showing the face, the other something that the individual created.

Then I added objects that immigrants brought from their country and text they wrote in their own hand to explore what it means to be uprooted. With this work, I try to give voice to immigrants and let their pride shine through.

I photograph the portrait of my guests using a Holga plastic lens that lacks definition to transcribe visually some of the loss of identity that immigrants face when they settle in a new country. 

To print my images, I use an alternative process to transfer them to silkscreen paper. This technique, which symbolizes the movement from one country to another and from one life to another, can be as unpredictable as the immigration process and show unexpected results. Videos of this process can be seen on my Instagram@pierreyveslinot

More quadriptychs can be seen on Social Documentary Network (SDN).