Tag: Fabio Bucciarelli

During our interview, I asked him how he could make a deal with those who had never recognized his people as legitimate, whose sniper had just killed his son. He needed no interpreter to respond. Looking straight into the camera, he explained how the war has become dirty, how it has transformed and how it no longer has anything to do with the struggle for freedom. He answered the question directly and bluntly: “How can we be friends with those who do business with our enemies?”

The last time I was in South Sudan was just after its independence. I remember the look on people’s faces — tired but happy, hopeful for a better future after a past full of pain and war. Today, only a couple of short years later, South Sudan is on the brink of an abyss.

In April, Italian photographer Fabio Bucciarelli spent 10 days photographing the patients of one of the country’s two state-run mental hospitals, Défilé de Beudet in Croix-des-Bouquets, outside Port-au-Prince. His pictures show the bleak conditions some of the country’s most vulnerable citizens face every day. “When you imagine a hospital, you think of white walls with clean beds,” says Bucciarelli. Instead, Haiti’s only hospital dedicated to helping the chronically mentally ill “looks like a prison.”