Kids Imagine Their Future Roles

Soldier. Patrick, 12 years old, dressed up as a soldier in Pinga, DR Congo. "I want to be a soldier, because I would like to fight for the population. Because my community already fled several times. Me too I fled my village 12 times already." © Vincent Tremeau

Diamond Collector. Aladi poses dressed up as a diamond collector, in Carnot, Central African Republic. "One day I will be collecting diamonds here so I can earn a lot of money." © Vincent Tremeau

Teacher. Awa poses dressed up as a teacher, in Carnot, Central African Republic. "We all want to do something with our lives. One day, I will be a teacher. But to teach others, I have to learn how to read and write first." © Vincent Tremeau

Soldier. Guilin, 10 years old, from Pinga, Democratic Republic of Congo, is dressed up as what he sees himself to become in the future : a soldier. © Vincent Tremeau

Journalist. "One day I will be a journalist, like my father who is working in a radio station. If there is visitors in my village, they will give me money and this will help me in the future." Georgine, 13 years old, from Pinga, Democratic Republic of Congo. © Vincent Tremeau

Taylor. Guinea. © Vincent Tremeau

Accountant. Sierra Leone. © Vincent Tremeau

Pilot. "One day I will be a pilot." Chaibou, Carnot, Central African Republic. © Vincent Tremeau

Basket Maker. "I would like to learn how to make baskets, because it will help me in the life to come. This will help my future children, little brothers, my sisters and me." Chandi, 10 years old from Pinga, North Kivu, Democratic Republic of Congo. © Vincent Tremeau

What do you want to be when you grow up? It is a question kids get asked by adults, and their answers reflect the world where they have been raised. When Vincent Tremeau asked that question of children living in Democratic Republic of the Congo, nearly all the boys picked soldier, “because they live in the context of war for their whole lives,” Tremeau tells PDN. His project “One Day I Will” is a collaboration with the children he has met while on assignments in Africa, in which he asks them to improvise costumes that represent their future selves. There are teachers, soccer players, farmers and a future president of Mali. Children who had witnessed Ebola often wanted to be doctors and nurses. “I never met any firemen, because there weren’t any,” says Tremeau, who was struck by the inventiveness of the children, who, with limited resources, turned tree branches into guns and ear buds into a stethoscope. An aspiring photographer makes his camera from a juice box, a driver uses a plastic tire to stand in for his future steering wheel. An exhibition of the series, along with work by Meredith Hutchison, is on view and in Brooklyn Bridge Park until October 21, and at the United Nations’s Visitors’ Lobby until October 14.

The project began in 2014, when Tremeau was shooting for an NGO in Central African Republic, documenting a group of Muslim refugees who had taken refuge from the civil war in a Catholic church, where they were protected by UN Peacekeepers but could not leave the compound. “They could not go out, otherwise they would get killed,” he recalls. “I found the situation terrible.” As he photographed, he was followed by 70 children who lived in the compound, laughing at “the white guy with the camera,” a funny thing to them. “Because they were following me everywhere, and wanted to be in the pictures, I wanted to talk with them.” But when he spoke with a little girl, her story was so upsetting she began to cry during the interview, and Tremeau realized a direct approach was too painful for many of the kids. “I thought, How can I address this issue? How can I tell her story? How can we have a common language? That’s how I imagined this game. I thought, I’ll ask all the kids, What do you want to be when you grow up? and ask them to dress up the way they see themselves in the future.” That act of imagination “doesn’t need any words to understand, and also it was just fun to do. It was refreshing,” he says. Since then, he has brought the project to CAR, eastern Congo, Niger, Mali, and to countries affected by Ebola—Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea. Tremeau plans to continue the series, tacking on shoots to paying assignments when he can, but he doesn’t want the project to get mixed into his paid work. “I like to keep my freedom, which is not easy in terms of funding,” he says, but “I have to continue to do it.”