A woman shivers in bed, half awake, a cigarette between her fingers. Beside her, a baby sleeps, and another, older child turns his back to the lens. Her name is Vickie. She is 17. She presides over a girl gang in the South Bronx, and has just come home from the hospital without a penny to heat the apartment. It’s an image no one forgets on the way out of the retrospective that Rencontres d’Arles is devoting, this summer, to Martine Barrat. It is, in fact, the most popular show of the festival, with a 30-minute wait to get in, every day, since opening.

Back to Oran, 1933. Martine Barrat was born into a bourgeois household near the sea, where her grandmother, an exiled Russian surgeon, held court. One day, the child watched Algerian women swimming in their finest clothes and heard the fury of the colonists at such audacity. She wasn’t yet 10. She already knew which side she stood on. “That’s where my hatred of racism began”, she told Le Monde, in an article published on July 3. Her entire body of work follows from it.

At 15, she left her family without looking back. A Swedish woman found her a job as a cabin maid on an ocean liner: her first wage, her first taste of independence. She landed alone in Sweden, slept under doorways clutching her money, sold vegetables in the street, shouting, because passers-by loved to hear her shout.

Paris came next. Dance, first, which she discovered as therapy before making it a profession. Then theater: she appeared nude in a bathtub under the direction of Jorge Lavelli, alongside her friend Copi, within the Argentine circle of Paris that included the painter Antonio Seguí and the filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky. She danced with Graziella Martinez on avant-garde stages. Within this bohemian world, one friendship from childhood endured: her bond with Yves Saint Laurent, with whom she used to swim as a girl on the beaches of Oran. He would remain, until the end, her most loyal patron.

Eric Williams, the domino champion, Harlem, 1983 © Martine Barrat

In 1968, a tour of Scotland changed everything. An American woman appeared backstage and invited her to come perform at her theater, in New York. Her name was Ellen Stewart, she ran La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, and she paid for two tickets: one for Martine, one for her son. A broken ankle ended her dancing career. Martine Barrat moved from job to job, waitress, go-go dancer, running video and music workshops for children on the Lower East Side. But her heart already belonged elsewhere: on the stoops of the brownstones on 125th Street, in Harlem, where the neighborhood’s children taught her their language. She found it poetic, musical, full of imagery, and recorded it all on cassette tapes. These children became her teachers, then her friends, then the subjects of a body of work that would never stop growing. The neighborhood nicknamed her “Picture Girl,” a name she still carries today, iPhone in pocket.

She dreamed of filming, but in the early 1970s, a video camera cost a fortune. It was the philosopher Félix Guattari, whom she met at demonstrations in Paris, who tracked one down for her through a Canadian university, a Portapak. She drove to fetch it, from New York, in a truck, with five children from Harlem and her musician lover.

That camera led her to the South Bronx, to Pearl, leader of the Roman Kings, whom she met through a neighbor at the Chelsea Hotel, where Barrat had taken up residence. They arranged to meet at Freeman station, in a neighborhood its own residents nicknamed “Korea,” so much did it resemble, in their words, a Korean battlefield. The gang members had first intended to steal her equipment. They changed their minds, amused by her nerve, and asked her, that same evening, to film the trial of one of their own, in a basement. It became The Trial, their first film together. It became a collective tool, one that everyone claimed as their own: they wrote the scripts by turns, took turns behind the camera.

For Martine Barrat, “South Bronx Story is the anti-West Side Story,” because she refused to romanticize their lives. “These people, treated as outcasts, are surprised and moved that she isn’t afraid of them”, explains Agathe Cancellieri, curator of the Arles exhibition and director of Galerie Rouge in Paris. Her outlook is driven by a quest for social justice, a desire to give voice to people who go unrepresented: “It is political, but from an intimate point of view”, the curator adds. Never moralizing, she goes on, Martine Barrat “is an integral part of the neighborhoods she photographs”, convinced it is her responsibility to photograph her subjects “with respect and devotion.”

Among the Roman Queens, the gang’s female counterpart, she grew close to Vickie Alvarez, president at 17, already the mother of two girls. “Vickie and I were lying on her bed. The full moon and the falling snow made the night particularly magical and silent”, Martine Barrat wrote years later. Piles of garbage turned into small mountains, broken windows into twinkling stars: “A ghost land. Was it real or only an illusion?” Vickie died of AIDS in 1986, at 26. Four of her brothers were murdered, another also died of AIDS. Her mother, Arine, keeps all their ashes close to her, next to the television, and survives on tranquillizers. “She was so dear to me”, Martine Barrat says of her late friend.

The theft of her camera earned her, a few years later, her first still camera: Pearl gave her, in amends, an Olympus. Another admirer, the chauffeur of Leica’s president, would later hand her her first Leica bodies. In 1978, the Whitney Museum staged an exhibition of this work, co-produced with the gang members themselves. Carlos Suarez, known as “Karate Charlie,” president of the Ghetto Brothers, prominently displayed his own dictionary of South Bronx slang, recording, word by word, how his peers spoke of fear, courage, or loyalty. Over 2,000 visitors came in three days to discover faces they had previously only seen in the crime pages.

Photography then led her to amateur boxing clubs, when a young girl from the South Bronx asked her, in 1979, to come photograph her there. She discovered Carlos Villafane, 5 years old, wearing an adult mouthguard far too big for him: “His eyes pierced my heart”, she would say of the boy. For years, she attended training every day, from 4 to 8 p.m., across the South Bronx, Harlem, and Brooklyn, invited to dinners, to parties, entrusted with the joys and sorrows of entire families. “It is in places where there is violence that I find love. Violence is the anger that comes from being denied the right to live”, she sums up. From this immersion came Do or Die, a book published in 1993, with a preface by Martin Scorsese and Gordon Parks. Muhammad Ali agreed to sign a few prints: the finest moment of her life, she would say.

In Harlem, always, she photographed Robert Humphrey, a boy who dreamed of becoming an actor, whose voice she recorded on tape before playing it for James Baldwin: the writer, moved to hear in it an echo of his own Harlem childhood, asked her to take him to the housing project where Robert and his mother, Margaret, lived. She photographed Mabel Halbert, a jazz singer who transformed every night under a white wig, and wrote, in a caption beneath her portrait: “We always had a great time eating those big waffles at Wales, around 5 in the morning. All the musicians were there, up, tired but happy.” Of Clara Chaplin, her friend of 15 years, she remembers the hands: “I give you my hands”, the old woman once told her, sitting outside her home. Of Love, her best friend who has been posing for her since she was 17, she says she “would stop cars in the street, she was so beautiful.” Domino players, dancers of the nascent hip-hop scene, breakers at block parties: she photographed them all with the same roving attention she gave the boxers. She worked like a jazz musician, movement, improvisation, rhythm, and it is no accident that she asked her friend Ornette Coleman, one of the great men of her life, to write the titles of her photographs himself.

Her passion for fashion never quite left her. A childhood friend of Saint Laurent, she made Woman Is Sweeter for him, a flamboyant, hippie-inflected film set to the music of the Hair composer, which the fashion house ultimately refused to release. She dressed the people of Harlem in Alaïa, those of Rio’s favelas in Yamamoto, convinced that beauty is not reserved for the privileged. Where Cartier-Bresson still hunted the decisive instant, she preferred to feed a subject for years on end, coming back, talking, giving, always waiting. From this intimacy came, among other things, a portrait of Bob Marley captured in a moment of total abandon, at home, on his own bed. When one of her own dies, she composes a tribute poster that she pastes up in the streets they used to frequent, so that their memory keeps living in the neighborhood. Lately, she has been returning to Far Rockaway, to photograph the birds and the queer community that gathers there: movement, swimming, dancing, always the same pursuit of freedom that she extends to others as much as to herself.

In 1982, while working for the newspaper Libération, Martine Barrat discovered the Goutte d’Or neighborhood in Paris, and immediately recognized the echo of the Harlem she loved so much. “As in New York, her outlook is animated by an unwavering attention to her subjects”, Agathe Cancellieri notes, for whom “its participatory, collective dimension” remains fundamental to her work. She photographed Mamadou, 6 years old, slumped in an abandoned armchair, round sunglasses swallowing his face: “Show me the magic”, the children at the market on 125th Street in New York would ask him, when she brought him there three months later. She sold a photograph to the Nouvel Observateur to buy him his first bicycle. Now deputy mayor of Paris in charge of youth, Mamadou Yaffa has never forgotten this woman who walked alone, fearless, through a neighborhood everyone else avoided.

Today, Martine Barrat still lives at the Chelsea Hotel in New York, one of its last year-round residents, 50 years after she moved in. The walls of her apartment tell the story, better than her sometimes faltering memory can, of half a century of friendships: Che Guevara, Ornette Coleman, dozens of strangers turned into family. She recently spent three months in the hospital and all but escaped from it to reclaim her full vitality. To every visitor, as they leave, she repeats the same thing: live every moment intensely, whether in joy or in sorrow.

“Soul of the City,” by Martine Barrat, is on view at Espace Van Gogh, in Arles, through October 4, 2026, as part of the Rencontres d’Arles festival.

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