Photographer's Profile

ELIE GALEY

GALEY PHOTO, France

Photographer since the 80s, today an Artisan Photographer based in Pordic in the Côtes d’Armor in Brittany. A former freelance photojournalist in the Middle East, I transcribed the daily life of the population, cultures and archeology into images, and created my photo library with tens of thousands of 6x6 Ektas and slides. I traveled through Iraq, Syria, Libya, Jordan, Palestine and Lebanon. I have never stopped photographing this region, the cradle of humanity which has seen the birth of great civilizations and innovations in all areas: writing, agriculture, science, legislation, architecture... But the oil economy, conflicts of interest, various interventionist policies, dictators and revolutionary protests have today created a spectacle of desolation and destruction against a backdrop of fanaticism and terrorism. The media and satellite images from Iraq and Syria have demonstrated the ransacking by the Islamic State of monuments, some of them 4,000 years old, of human mass graves implying the extermination of Christian and Yazidis communities. In short, a crime against humanity, the annihilation of History live. Authors or co-authors of 5 books and several articles in the French and Middle Eastern press.