What stroke me in Iran was the difference in between the image the western media want to give of the country and what I saw. From the young trendy women (and men) in Teheran to the more traditional ones found in the 'provinces', there is a strong link based on Iranian culture and traditions. And these traditions have made me felt welcome and safe wherever I went.

“Maya and Kohinoor are like my daughters. You know I don’t have daughters so they replace them.” Despite the fact that Maya and Kohinoor call Maizzuddin and his wife ‘mama’ and ‘mami’, the equivalent of uncle and aunt, they are not really part of the family. The three sons of the house attend school or university while Maya and Kohinoor stay home to clean, tide up, cook, and wash. They both have been working as domestic servants at Maizzuddin’s for the last year. They are everywhere and do whatever is asked from them: bring a glass of water, prepare and check Tanzin’s schoolbag, massage Tonmoy’s head … Their names can be heard throughout the day according to the work to be done. They seldom go out and in any case, rarely alone. Before moving to Maizzuddin’s, they use to go to school. Now the only class attended by Kohinoor is the ‘religion class’, twice a week. Being Hindu, Maya does not attend. Maya and Kohinoor belong to the crowd of young domestic servants which number, in Bangladesh, does not decrease. Most of these children come from poor rural families who hope, by entrusting their daughter to an urban family, to increase their revenues and to create a relationship, which could turn out to be useful in the future. Maizzuddin gives 1,000 Takas monthly to each family. Parents also consider that it is a good way to prepare their daughters to the work they will have to perform as housewife, which they will all become, sooner or later. For Maizzuddin, it is a question of ‘prestige’. To employ domestic servants contributes to improve his status. It is like having a fridge or a television. In the evening, after doing the dishes, the girls deploy their mattresses on one of the four rooms’ floor. They will wake up at around 6:30 a.m. the following day to prepare Maizzuddin’s breakfast.

Changing and immutable Cuba, an island where nothing seems to happen but where you want to go back as soon as you have left it.

Shakari bazaar, Dhaka. It is midnight. Mohamed Nuru and his men wait for the streets to empty in order to start working. They are ‘nehari wallahs’ or dust diggers. Shakari bazaar is the largest gold market of Bangladesh, a district where gather the jewelers of the country, most of them Hindu. Every day a great number of jewels are made and in this occasion, tiny particles of the noble metal escape from numerous workshops gathered in several multi-storey buildings. And it is this golden dust for which are looking the nehari wallahs. It is near 2 am in the morning when Mohamed, Sorel, Jahangir and the others begin to sweep, clean every hidden recess, every channel of the corridors onto which the shops look filling their containers of all the waste they find. They also occasionally go into the sewers to collect the dust taken away by the water. Few hours later, the waste is carefully washed in a small room occupied partially by a pool of blackish water. In the end, only a small quantity of grey sand remains, the golden reflections of which let guess the presence of the gold. Once collected using acid and mercury, it will be immediately sold. Mohamed began at the age of 25. It is his father who taught him the job, which he held himself from his own father. As for his sons, they go to school and he does not want them to take over. Business is not good at the moment. More expansive becomes the gold, less orders there are. Fewer orders mean less dust.

“From women's eyes this doctrine I derive: They sparkle still the right Promethean fire; They are the books, the arts, the academes, That show, contain and nourish all the world.” William Shakespeare When I asked women in the brothel of Daulotdia in Bangladesh if I could take their pictures, they accepted under the condition that their face would not be shown.

Although we think of bathing as a private activity, the public bath, or hammam, has been a vital social institution in any Middle Eastern city for centuries. While in the West, the tradition of public baths popularized under the Romans slowly died out, it continued over many centuries in the eastern world, until the advent of modern plumbing has rendered their services obsolete. Today, even in the Middle East, hammams are abandoned, falling into ruins or revived for touristic purposes. But in Sana’a, the capital of Yemen, inhabited for more than 2,500 years, they are still in activity. In the old city, at the time these pictures were taken (2010-2011), there were 14 hammams, all of them more than 500 years old. The hammams of Yemen distinguish themselves from their Egyptian and Syrian Middle Eastern equivalents in particular for their heating system, which is based on conduits going through the basement and the walls of the warmest parts (‘sadr’). Also the Yemenite hammams are partially built below the ground level, so much that they pass about unnoticed in the townscape. The hammams of Sana’a continue to be frequented by a very diversified clientele, city-dwellers certainly but also provincials from all Yemen. The function of the hammams does not limit itself to the personal hygiene, nor to its real or supposed therapeutic virtues. It is above all a place of sociability, marked by its rhythms and by its rites and traditions. In brief, there is a real ‘culture of the hammams’, which doubtless contributes to insert into the city the people recently arrived and to give them an urban identity. It is also a place of initiation into sexual life where the various generations of the same family go together. Until recently, hammams were managed, from generation to generation, by some seven or eight families connected between them by multiple marital links. Of lower social status, they rented hammams from ‘waqfs’ and all their members, men and women, assured all the services inside.

“I live here, and here lives my family. I don’t want to leave.” Sojun has arrived in the brothel of Daulotdia, in Bangladesh, when he was barely 15 years old, to look after Kajoli, the ‘wife’ of his brother Razan, in order to serve and protect her. For more than eight years, Sojun has shared her room, her meals, her drugs and alcohol. When Kajoli gets angry with him, she reminds him that the money she receives from Razan is her money. “You totally depends on me, you are my servant and I am the one who supports you. I can hit you, throw you outside if it pleases me.” Once she comes down, she admits that she cannot live without Sojun. Bishti, Biti and Meghla, Kajoli’s sisters, think of him as a brother. Daulotdia is a Bangladeshi village, apparently like many others except for one thing: here men have to pay to get in. 160 km from Dhaka on the banks of the Jamuna river, Daulotdia is probably one of the biggest brothels in the world: every day, 2,500 women sale their services to 3,000 men who have come to spend few days if not few years there. A certain number of men live in the brothel, more or less permanently. First, there are the regular clients called ‘balobachallo’ who come to visit their ‘wives’ like Kajoli’s father, Abdul Mondul used to do until he died few years ago. Then, there are the men who work in the brothel, as ‘servants’ or shopkeepers. Most of the shops are run by men who spend their days there but not their nights. They declare earning far more than outside. As for Lalpu, Kajoli’s brother, he was born in the brothel. For men like him, it is difficult to place himself in such an organized matriarchal society. Until few months ago, his two elder sisters were supporting him. He now lives with his girlfriend, Mooni.. The brothel is the only place in Bangladesh where a woman can be financially independent without being criticized. Mookin has chosen to stay in Daulotdia few years ago after being brought to the place by a friend. He used to work in a garment factory in Dhaka, was married and ‘had’ a son. He now earns some money doing errands for several prostitutes. A way to escape the responsibilities that men are expected to fulfil outside of the brothel? The brothel is not a place where men come only for sexual services. They also come to relax, drink, smoke away from the gaze of the ‘normal’ society. Despite the many requests of his parents to come back to the village in order to marry him off, Sojun does not want to leave. He does not see himself living outside. His destiny is tightly linked to Kajoli’s.

Le bastion d'Al-Qaida. Un nid de terroristes prêts à se faire exploser. Une bande de terre poussiéreuse, coincée sous l'Arabie saoudite et ravagée par des conflits hors d'âge... Voilà le Yémen en quelques clichés. Qu'ils soient kamikazes ou militaires putschistes, les rares Yéménites dont le nom franchit les frontières sont des hommes. Ou bien des petites filles mariées de force, comme Noujoud, divorcée à 10 ans. Pourtant, la société yéménite, c'est aussi celle de jeunes femmes comme Fatima. A 26 ans, titulaire d'un diplôme d'histoire, Fatima a intégré l'équipe d'archéologues qui travaillent à la restauration de la vieille mosquée de Sana'a. Toujours célibataire, elle vit chez ses parents. Pas un des prétendants qui se sont présentés ne l'a convaincue. Celui qu'elle acceptera d'épouser sera un homme ouvert d'esprit et respectueux des femmes. Une fois qu'elle sera mariée, elle ouvrira une école qui offrira les mêmes opportunités aux garçons et aux filles. On y enseignera la musique, les sports et le dessin. Archéologues, enseignantes, médecins, étudiantes, employées de bureau... Cette galerie de portraits raconte le Yémen d'aujourd'hui. Parcours singuliers, mais qui chacun à leur manière témoignent d'une société moins sclérosée qu'elle n'y paraît. Le Yémen, pays où la loi tribale l'emporte sur la loi fédérale, pays récemment unifié mais à nouveau déchiré de toutes parts... Pays où une génération de femmes s'est mise en tête de rendre un hommage discret à son illustre et courageuse aïeule, la Reine de Saba. Avec volonté mais en douceur, les femmes yéménites s'engagent sur des chemins qui leur ont longtemps été interdits. De l'école au mariage, elles reprennent leur vie en main.

Standing barefoot in a pool of waste water, 28 years old leather worker Habibur fears his job is sending him to an early grave. Fifteen years of inhaling fumes from the chemicals used to turn Bangladeshi raw hide into soft leather for shoes or bags to be sold in the West or in China has given Habibur a shallow cough and stabbing chest pains. “I don’t like this job but I have no choice. There is nothing else’. He is married and father of a boy. His two brothers, like him, work in a tannery. Cow and goat skins, caked in salt and often still bloody from the slaughterhouse, are stacked inside the tannery. “The stench from the raw hides doesn’t bother me anymore. This is the least of my problems.” The district of Hazaribagh, home to more than hundred tanneries, has become a wasteland of toxic swamps, garbage landfills and mountains of decomposing leather scraps, which surround the slums where the workers live. Every day, the tanneries collectively dump 22,000 of toxic waste into the Buriganga, Dhaka’s main river and a key water supply. Business is nevertheless booming as growing global demand from the West and from China is rising. Because leather is the country’s fastest growing export, the Bangladeshi government has long turned a blind eye to the rampant pollution and terrible working conditions inside the tannery. The buyers, the vast majority coming from France, Italy, Russia, Japan and China remain silent.

Since time immemorial, Yemenis have been adept at making the best use of scarce water through technology and careful husbandry. Their terraces, elaborate water harvesting structures, and skilful management of springs and flood flows allowed the country to support a large population and a sustainable agricultural economy. But since the creation of the modern state the country has fallen into a water crisis characterized by the very rapid mining of groundwater, extreme water supply shortages in the major cities, and limited access of the population to safe drinking water. These problems are by no means unique to Yemen, but in no other country in the Middle East is the rate of exhaustion of aquifers proceeding so fast; no other capital city faces the prospect of running out of water within the next decade. The main causes of the crisis include rising demand for water as the population grows at a very high rate (3.5%) and market-led agriculture develops; the unregulated exploitation of groundwater resources; and policies which have promoted expansion rather than efficient use and sustainable management. Finally, the government's supportive attitude towards the booming production and use of qat, the country's most profitable cash crop, has accelerated trends towards overpumping: qat is estimated to consume 30% of all irrigation water. The population of 22.6 millions inhabitants is expected to double over the next 20 years. If no sustainable way to manage the water supply can be found, the area is likely to become even more unstable. Violent conflicts over water have already broken out in some of the northern provinces.