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Italian photographer Valerio Vincenzo discovered France for the first time on an Erasmus exchange. He wanted to stay but, to do so, he needed a residence permit. This was before the Schengen Agreement. Having lived through the before and after, the photographer decided in 2007 to photograph border areas, which turned out to be far removed from the images of barriers still anchored in the common imagination. This work, published in the book Borderline, Frontiers of Peace (2017), won him the Louise Weiss Prize for European Journalism (the first time this prize has been awarded for a photographic work).
Since the Schengen Agreement came into force in 1995, the barriers at the borders of a large part of the European continent have been gradually disappearing from our landscapes. In terms of the European history of the 19th and 20th centuries, full of scars, walls and trenches, this is also a revolution. The unification of Europe, with the abolition of most identity checks and customs facilities, has redefined the notion of state borders. Since 2007, using a GPS and detailed maps, Valerio Vincenzo has covered more than 20,000 km of these peaceful lines. Although these photographs were taken thousands of kilometers apart, they all convey an image that differs from the stereotypes we associate with the notion of border. By the way, what is a border?
