Retracing the original route of India’s Romany people since their first forced migrations, circa 1000.

Tiane Doan na Champassak’s father, a painter, offered his son a Pentax for his 10th birthday: that was all it took to bring forth a passion and reveal a talent. Doan na Champassak then learned to develop his photos in a lab belonging to his father, an unconditional fan of black and white photography. Even before he entered the Dawson Institute of Photography in Montreal, he knew that he wanted to make photography his profession. “When you take a photo, you need to respect the people you are photographing. You can’t hide behind a camera. The human contact is more important than anything else.” This principle seems to work well for Tiane Doan na Champassak, who has been fascinated by the Romany people and their adaptability since 1993 – perhaps because, like him, they have few ties to a particular place. Tiane Doan na Champassak was born in Puyvert, between Aix-en-Provence and Avignon, and grew up in Spain and Morocco before moving to Quebec. It was during his Provence sojourn that he first became interested in Romany families. He photographed them in France, Romania and Bulgaria, and the photos he took were richly emotional. Thanks to the Jean-Luc Lagardère Foundation grant, he was able to travel to India and follow in the footsteps of the ancestors of Europe’s Romany people. He retraced their original route between India and Afghanistan, which the Romany people have followed since their first forced migrations, circa 1000.

Achievements since winning the grant

In 1998, Tiane Doan na Champassak’s special report, for which was he was awarded the Jean-Luc Lagardère Foundation grant, was exhibited as a part of the Visa pour l’Image Festival in Perpignan and was published by the Italian newspaper La Republica. At the end of 1998, the Courrier de l’Unesco devoted seven pages to a series of photos that Tiane Doan na Champassak had taken on the caste struggle in India. A fervent admirer of that country, he also brought back a story on Bihar’s Jharia coalfield mines, which have been burning for 70 years. These photographs were purchased by Paris Match and the Sunday Times and exhibited in the Saint Dominique chapel during the Perpignan festival. Since then, Tiane Doan na Champassak has returned to India once again to photograph the chagara, a maritime phenomenon related to the monsoon, from which the local fishermen hope to derive a miraculous catch.

In 1999, he travelled for the first time to Laos, the land of his ancestors, who lived in the Champassak region. The monthly magazine Géo published his photographs of a pre-Angkor Wat temple the same year, together with pictures taken by his father 30 years earlier.

In 2001, he was the winner of the Villa Médicis Hors-Les-Murs prize, the SCAM’s Photo Portfolio prize and a World Press prize for a story on India’s Maha Kumbh Mela, exhibited during Perpignan’s Visa pour l’Image Festival.  Tiane Doan na Champassak takes numerous orders from such magazines as Germany’s Stern and Die Weltuoche and France’s National Geographic, ELLE and Géo.

In 2003, his work Le Sexe des Anges was published by La Martinière.

In 2005, he produced a project on faith, distributed by the Vu agency.

In November 2006, his work was exhibited at Paris’ Maison Européenne de la Photographie (European photography centre).