For over twenty years, Philippe Bazin photograph the face of individuals caught in an institutional context (the hospital, hospice, schools, prisons …). The whole of this vast art project on the faces of our contemporaries questioned the presence of man in the institutions that frame our lives from birth to death, as Michel Foucault was able to speak in his work, but poses also the question of singularity. It is through photography, to give face to those who missed our eyes, have often lost sight of a collective. Each face is shown as a statement of the presence in the world, made of flesh and a light with which we rely. Photographs of P. Bazin avoid psychologism any pathos, and do not seek to uncover an alleged interiority, they are not a social but attempting to empty any presence outside oneself.
We can consider that Bazin makes a kind of collective memory from some fringes of our society.