Monday March 16, 2020, 3:58 p.m. at the Metz fire headquarters: in four hours, Emmanuel Macron will announce the confinement of an entire country, which will go into a state of health emergency. Arnaud Beinat is there, with his friends and fellow firefighters, aware of participating in a dramatic adventure of which no one knows the outcome: “I was an expert officer responsible for following the activity of the 5e company whose headquarters is in Metz. A friend told me: it’s the atomic alert… he didn’t mean to say that well. And I couldn’t imagine being anywhere other than with my fellow firefighters. It was a historic, distressing moment and everyone was aware of it,” explains Arnaud Beinat, who signed a work on behalf of the Departmental Union of Moselle Firefighters which brings together all his photos of confinement.
For the benefit of firefighters
An order from the fire brigade staff, the sales of which will go to the Departmental Union and its social works. A free testimony about those who were on the front line, like the caregivers: “There were no more road accidents, the streets were deserted, the towns seemed frozen in an American disaster film. And paradoxically, I have never gone out so much with my friends. Essentially assistance to people, as close as possible to an unprecedented health disaster.” During confinement, Arnaud Beinat, an independent reporter who has worked for so many media – Sipa where he started, Match, Cibles – took hundreds of photos.
“No one flinched”
“We entered apartments, without knowing whether the person found dead had died of Covid or not. Initially there were a few masks, the equipment only arrived afterwards. We knew nothing or not much. We thought it was an Ebola type virus, the mechanisms were quite unknown, colleagues went home wondering if they were not going to contaminate the whole family. And yet I haven’t seen a single one flinch…” explains the Metz photographer, who captured moving moments, as close as possible to the interventions often captured within reach. Without voyeurism, with modesty. Today attached to the Departmental Union of Moselle Firefighters, whose interventions he follows all of, Arnaud Beinat delivers a testimony in which his brothers in arms worked in silence, without asking for anything in return. This book is dedicated to them. Five years later, it resonates like the echo of the astonishment of Western societies. Who were able to measure their health fragility and paid a high price for it.
The work is available from the Departmental Union of Moselle Firefighters, via an internet link with order form.
