My life is a bunker 2015
In April 2015, with the help of Tomas Vlach, emergency coordinator for the NGO "People in Need", I visited families living in old cold war bunkers in the city of Marinka and Petrovsky – Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine. They live there for two reasons: either their houses got demolished or damaged by the fighting in between Ukrainian army and the separatists. Or, they are just afraid, traumatize by the constant sound of the mortars, bombs, automatic weapons, etc so they prefer to abandoned their home and find refuge in these old underground concrete constructions. Most of the families began abandoning their houses last august as the battle between the protagonists was extremely intensive. These bunkers are located in the separatists control zone so access for humanitarian organizations is possible but very difficult to organize in a war area.
My Inukjuak 2017
I spend two years with the Inuit people in Inukjuak, a small village 1600 km north of Montreal, in n area call Nunavik. This work represent my personal point of view with this thousand years old culture, who survived a such hostile environment in the deep frozen north of Canada.
Note: The text above was written by the Artist. No modification was made by COCA.
Yves Choquette
Canada
I have begin taking photos since I was 11, taking my father’s Brownie Super 27 camera, without his permission, to shoot people throwing stones at soldiers in the street of Montreal, during the 1970 October crisis. I found out early that I was more attracted by stories than by simply shooting for the sake of it. Unfortunately, I never took it seriously until a friend asked me in the 80’s to take a photographic road trip of him and his band, between Montreal and Chibougamau, to the far north east of Quebec. Since then I have shot different documentaries covering mainly social or humanitarian issues.
What motivates me is helping groups of people suffering from injustice, to gain media attention so their story can be known.
My work has been published in CBC, Nunatsiak News, Ricochet Media, Latitude magazine, The Palestine Telegraph, Reporter SA, Life Force magazine, La Presse, Journal de Montréal, Bayard groups, Center for armaments research as many other newspapers and magazines.