I was surprised to see that people still manage to retain an incredible joie de vivre. When you visit these places, it is as if nothing has happened. People agree to be photographed, perhaps all too easily. I admit that I felt a bit guilty about intruding into their private lives like this.

These people have travelled dozens of kilometres to escape the fighting. They have witnessed tragedies. You arrive as a photographer in the middle of these villages and camps and strangely you still don’t feel as if a conflict is being waged in the region.

Children surround you. They laugh the whole time. Poverty is not the first thing you see in people’s faces. They are pleased to have visitors. That is what is striking. It is therefore very hard to capture the true extent of the problems because life goes on despite everything.

It is sometimes difficult to explain what a humanitarian emergency really means to people who live far away in a fair degree of comfort. What can a photograph reveal and what can it not show?

I work differently and I tend to engage in long-term projects. I prefer to stay in a country for a longish period in order to get a better feeling of what is going on there. I prefer complex images because they reflect the complexity of life itself.

There is a conflict between the utilitarian aspect of certain images taken for a precise purpose and photographs expressing a more personal viewpoint. I am always somewhere in the middle. Can you really grasp a situation through a picture? Yes, perhaps. You try, even if you stay a stranger looking in from the outside. What you are aiming at is photographs showing situations that have repercussions on people’s lives. That is why I am a photographer.

You place a lot of emphasis on the fact that you are not a journalist. What is the difference in your opinion?

My approach diverges substantially from that of press photographers – many of whom I respect. Press photographers generally spend much less time on the spot, one or two weeks for example. Their journey is expensive and they are under press from the media to return with pictures that “will sell”. So what do they do? They visit refugee camps and want to photograph combatants. They are looking for images with an immediate visual impact that will shock the public.

I take another tack, even if I sometimes visit the same places. I always spend two or three years on a personal project which admittedly includes a journalistic aspect, since it is linked to actual events. But there are also “lies” in my work, because by juxtaposing various photos, you can recreate a reality of your own choice.

There is also a style, or a technique, which makes it possible to dramatize the situation. Sometimes I intensify my pictures. I add elements. I mix images which can raise questions rather than supply answers.

I like visitors to my exhibitions to ask questions on leaving them. Journalistic photos are quickly forgotten. That is the big difference. My projects are more like essays, novels or films. I am not an illustrator.

On the other hand, for the ICRC I took more objective photos than those in my artistic work. I confined myself to the documentary style, because if I started to “play around”, it might have been misunderstood.

What is the greatest difficulty facing a photographer in an area affected by a conflict?

The main thing is not to fall prey to the conflict oneself. Clashes are constantly taking place in the east of the DRC where a lot of people carry weapons. But a photographer must ignore these concerns, or he cannot work. You can’t think for the whole time that you are travelling between Goma and Masis that you could be attacked by armed groups.

The second obstacle is connected with the people we meet, who are often in a state of shock because of the conflict. And once again someone is going to invade their privacy, perhaps not with a weapon, but with a camera.

I don’t like clichés and opportunism. The photos I take in these circumstances must be consistent with reality. It is necessary to capture the contrast between the serious nature of the problems and the fact that life continues. And that is the hardest moment for the people you are photographing, because you interfere even more in their life. And they resent it.