Keep it in the family

Writer-photographer Hélène Tremblay has lived alongside families in 116 countries over 25 years. It’s given her an unprecedented insight into what makes us human, she tells Laura Bridgestock

“To present humanity to humanity – this is my project.” Hélène Tremblay, founder of Families of the World, is the first to admit her mission statement is an ambitious one. “My dream is a big dream. I keep it because it’s possible to visualize. You can imagine every family in the world with a book about all the other families.”

In pursuit of her vision, she’s spent the last 25 years visiting families around the world. She stays with them, participates in their daily routines and takes photographs. Her observations and pictures are published in the Families of the World series of books, which provide portraits of whole countries and continents by studying everyday life.

“To present humanity to humanity – this is my project.”

To date, almost 100,000 copies of the first two major volumes, The Americas and the Caribbean and East Asia, Southeast Asia and the Pacific, have been distributed worldwide. Hélène’s aim is to complete a five-book collection covering every country in the world. Her work brings her into regular contact with IB World Schools and she has been a popular speaker at IB conferences and events across the world.

Hélène ambitiously envisages her finished collection of books as part of a ‘welcome pack’ given to all new world citizens: “The greatest thing to know in this life is the planet, who we are and where we are.” For Hélène, such knowledge is a universal human right. She talks about the inequalities of knowledge distribution and the unjustified focus on the western world. This, she says, “is not humanity, and it’s not what humanity should be.”

She’s concerned that many schools aren’t doing enough. “Often there aren’t even maps on the walls. So how do we get students to feel like world citizens? Every educational facility needs to say yes, we will present humanity to humanity. I’m thankful for the IB’s decision to make this a priority.” Her involvement with the IB began more than a decade ago when a teacher in Canada invited her to speak to her class. Since then, she’s spoken at IB conferences around the world and visited IB students in Jordan, Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Oman and the USA.

As a result, she says, she’s increasingly come to appreciate the overlap between her project and the aims of the IB: “I also realized how pleased the young people were and how eager they are for a new vision of the world. We’re wrong to think people will be more willing to help if we focus on the negatives. It’s about sharing beauty and our humanity.

“Young people need that. They want a positive message. I tell them, ‘you cannot live everywhere on earth, but you can make it so that the world inhabits you.’” She sees herselfas a role model for positive action. “I had an idea, I made it my project, and I never dropped it,” she says.

The idea was born in 1981. “I was working in Paris in advertising, and I was working with a lot of people who kept saying they were good at communicating. I said to myself, ‘why do we say this, when there are so many people around the world, so many people being born?’” She set out to get to know people and introduce them to each other.

It’s important to Hélène that she experience the lives of those she writes about and photographs at first hand. She spends time with the men, women and children individually. “I try to be forgotten,” she says. “The major thing is for them to live their lives.” For this reason, she never uses a video camera, as it gets in the way of intimacy. “They have to kind of see me as a sister.”

“He said, ‘I never realized I could compare my life with these people in other countries. When I look at your book it makes me feel good to be who I am.’”

Confidences are often made at unexpected moments, in the middle of routine tasks: “It’s when you’re lying down, or doing the cooking. You never know when it’s going to come. You just have to make yourself available, live their lives.” She recalls a trip to the Pacific, where she joined women who walk for three hours each day to collect water and wood. “You stop, you talk, suddenly all kinds of things are said.” Even the taboo subjects of domestic violence and female genital cutting have been broached in this way.

Hélène is currently fundraising for further visits and also hopes to publish a book on Europe, though publishers are less keen on books about the developed world. For Hélène, this misses the point. Her project is about finding the common elements that allow individuals to see themselves as part of a single humanity.

She recalls the response of a Zimbabwean man to one of her books. “He said, ‘I never realized I could compare my life with these people in other countries. When I look at your book it makes me feel good to be who I am.’”