Photographer and freelance journalist, Sarah Leduc is a portraitist committed to humanitarian and social issues. For several years now, she has been interested in the different facets of women's exile: between separation, wandering, dream of autonomy, desire for elsewhere and the need to find a rooted place.

She was awarded the 2nd prize in the grant for social photography 2025 for her project "Tillandsias, journeys of women in exile", a documentary in several parts. 

Long forgotten in narratives of migration, more and more women are leaving their countries to find refuge in Europe. Some are welcomed, with varying degrees of dignity, while the majority are rejected. They all have an inner exile in common: neither the departure nor the journey, but the feeling of wandering experienced by those who cannot find a place "in a shared world", as the sociologist Michel Agier has written.
For women in exile, the road appears to have no exit. On their arrival in Europe, the obstacles are not removed, on the contrary. Reduced to the status of foreigners, many of them are unable to find a place where they can rebuild their lives, have a fresh start and live again. Yet beyond the difficulties, they are also adventurers, strategists and fighters in search of an escape route.
Neither heroines nor victims, they fight to find their place, like the tillandsias, the plants that bloom in the air, always out of the ground.

Salimata passes through the days quietly, like a shadow, always discreet, with the obligation to leave the country hanging over her head like a sword of Damocles. She tries to make her presence invisible.
© Sarah Leduc

After the first two chapters, one completed and the other in progress, the following ones will be devoted to the portrait of Nurie, an Albanian refugee with invisible scars, and the other to the end of life in exile.

Queen mothers.
© Sarah Leduc