Born in 1966, Daloa, Ivory Coast. Lives and works in Montpellier, France.
Dorris Haron Kasco was born in 1966 in Daloa, Côte d’Ivoire. After finishing his studies, he became interested in fashion through photography, but he was soon drawn to urban space, city streets, and the people encountered outdoors. He then spent three years documenting people with mental illness in Abidjan.
“The madmen of Abidjan,” photographed by Dorris Haron Kasco, bear witness to a harsh reality of denial—or, worse, to a collective blindness that rejects their nocturnal silhouettes in the public spaces of the modern city: bridges, streets, and intersections. Although they exist, they are free to roam, offering evidence of a traditional tolerance and a form of social coexistence with the manias that affect them—a singular attention within African societies to their exposed vulnerability, their fragmented speech, and their restless bodies.
He organized the first photographic inventory of Côte d’Ivoire and contributed to the recognition of the work of Auguste Cornélius Azaglo. He also made a film about August Azaglo, which was shown at the Bamako Encounters Photography Biennial in 2001. Dorris Haron Kasco lives and works in Montpellier, France.
