Yes to a Rosy future

Falling stylistically somewhere between Oriental Baroque and Soviet monumentalism, the portraits of Bashar al-Assad have long transformed the streets of Syria into a surprising urban landscape. Nicolas Righetti, who regularly photographs totalitarian icons, was in Damascus during the President's last re-election campaign, during which the city fell hostage to veritable visual overkill. He captured these propagandistic images in context and in whatever their state : some even torn, wrinkled or stained. That was in 2007. Since then, Bashar al-Assad's rhetoric has become, sadly, all too familiar. Faced with these portraits of triumphant power, his obdurate statements resound with a brutal cynicism that ultimately reveals a completely different portrait : the smiling face of repression.