Ludovic Carème developed a passion for photography in high school, inspired by reading the reports in the newspaper Libération on the R.E.R at the beginning of the eighties. He studied photography at ETPA in Toulouse and published his first photos in Libération in 1993.
In 1995, on an idea from Jean Hatzfeld, he took portraits of refugee couples who had escaped the horrors of Srebrenica. This first experience instilled in him the urgency to bear witness to injustice and human fragility with his Rolleiflex or Hasselblad 6X6. His sensitive style, both contemporary and rooted in the tradition of portraitists, established itself in the "culture" and "society" sections of French and international press (Libération, Télérama, Le Monde, Nova, Elle, l’Equipe Mag, The New York Times, The Guardian, La Repubblica delle Donne...). His portraits of undocumented Malian hunger strikers at Saint-Bernard church, Act-Up actions, or the Haitian "slaves" of sugar cane plantations in the Dominican Republic, reveal the drama of stars and the splendor of the defeated, which opened doors to record companies and festivals.
In 2007, Ludovic Carème moved to São Paulo, Brazil, as a correspondent for major French press outlets and focused on various long-term projects. He explored a favela condemned to destruction by real estate speculation and documented the daily lives of its inhabitants over a period of more than two years. This work, named after the favela "Agua Branca," led him to delve deeper into the gap separating the white dominant class with its empty buildings from its victims. The less fortunate limited their homes to tarps or blankets forming sad "cocoons" on the asphalt of São Paulo's old center. The photographer traced the currents to the Amazonian state of Acre, meeting the "Seringueiros," the rubber tappers. These descendants of impoverished peasants from the Northeast, sent by authorities to this forest to resume production at the start of World War II, often mixed with the Kaxinawa, Asháninka, Jaminawa, Yawanawa Indians... and were also exploited and decimated. Today, some tribes still live in harmony with the forest, encroached upon by these descendants of rubber soldiers, manipulated by the power of the agro-industrial industry. Two books published by Xavier Barral Editions, "Brésils Amazonie" and "Brésils São Paulo," confront humans with nature and urban dryness. This body of work was exhibited in 2019 at the Friche la Belle de Mai in Marseille and in 2023 at MAR in Rio de Janeiro. In 2022, he won the BNF / Grand Photographic Commission "Radioscopie de la France" for his project "Les Cadis de Mayotte."
Ludovic Carème is represented by the Vu agency. Since 2019, he has lived and worked mainly in France.
