Simple - FotoSlovo 2026 - Category « Voyage / Essai »

This image is an act of visual resistance, an aesthetic and political response to the hardening social and legislative climate in Senegal. By covering their faces with the national flag, these two men in traditional caftans refuse exclusion: they assert that homosexual identity and Senegalese identity are not antinomical, but inseparable.

While political discourse tends to dehumanize sexual minorities by presenting them as an external threat or a cultural "import," this photograph reinstates intimacy at the heart of the sacred and the patriotic. The contact of their foreheads, precisely where the green star lies, symbolizes a shattered unity that love seeks to mend. The prayer rug and traditional attire serve as reminders that these individuals renounce neither their faith nor their roots, despite a law that criminalizes their very existence.

In this arid, desert landscape, the image highlights the solitude and forced invisibility to which repression condemns them, while elevating tenderness as the ultimate bulwark against state violence. It is a silent cry claiming the right to exist, to love, and to believe under the same sky—and above all, under the same flag.