Côte d’Ivoire is crossed from north to south by a railway line that was built during the French colonial period to transport natural resources to the port of Abidjan, and from there to metropolitan France. French-Ivorian photographer François-Xavier Gbré undertook a photographic journey along this route supported by a grant awarded as part of the inaugural edition of Latitudes, a new programme launched in 2024 to support contemporary photography. The initiative was developed by the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès, in partnership with the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris and the International Centre of Photography in New York (United States).

Combining a documentary approach with a poetic eye, François-Xavier Gbré travelled along the railway, capturing the surrounding landscapes that appear as complex traces of a bygone era. Multiple layers overlap in his images, evoking railway allegories of a plural heritage – stretching from the colonial period, through independence, to the present day. The passage of time is at times starkly visible, as in an image of a monumental tree growing between the tracks. The series alternates between wide-angle shots and close-ups, graphic compositions and unusual arrangements, singular nocturnal lighting and all-enveloping mists. Its title, “Radio Ballast”, is a term used by railway workers to refer to rumours that circulate by word of mouth. As he searches for stories along the rails and the tracksides, the photographer embraces the strangeness that forms an inextricable part of his project.

François-Xavier Gbré was born in 1978 in Lille, France, and currently works between Abidjan and La Rochelle. As the first laureate of the Latitudes programme, his series will be shown in a solo exhibition at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris from October 29, 2025 to January 11, 2026. It will subsequently be presented in New York at the International Center of Photography from January to May 2026, before a final exhibition in Côte d’Ivoire in 2027. In order to ensure that “Radio Ballast” reaches as broad an audience as possible, the series will be published as a bilingual monograph (French/English), co-published by Atelier EXB and the Fondation d'entreprise Hermès.