Entrance to Alfredo Jaar's The Sound of Silence video booth.

Alfredo Jaar was born in Chile, and now lives and works in New York. His work considers the divide between the developed and developing worlds, calling into question the visual strategies used by the West to portray other countries. At Le Mois de la Photo he is presenting a video projection booth called The Sound of Silence, which relates the story of Kevin Carter's image of an infant Sudanese famine victim, who is dwarfed by a large and menacing vulture. Carter won the Pulitzer Prize for the image in 1994, but committed suicide just a few months afterwards. DS Diane Smyth, AJ Alfredo Jaar.

DS How does this piece fit into the rest of your work?

AJ It is right at the heart of what I do. I have been working for 30 years on the politics of images and issues of representation and so I think this piece is really at the root of my concerns for a long time. This work seem to have captured the audience’s imagination – this is its 10th presentation. It hasn’t stopped touring around the world, it is going to the Moscow Biennale next week and then to Japan in November, here it is in French and we’ve also done it in Italian.

DS What do you hope to do with this work?

AJ I am an architect, I never trained in art, I consider myself an architect making art, I use the methodology of the architect – I give myself a programme for each work that I make. One of the fundamental points about this work is communication. I want to make people think about these representations, so it’s very important for me to create work that has different levels, differents points of entry. All my work has many layers – some people will enter the work at a basic level, others will enter at a deeper level, but hopefully they will all be able to connect with the work.

I’m practically on an impossible mission, but I think it’s very important to try to get people to question images. We’ve been taught how to read and write but no one has ever taught us how to look at images. We don’t understand the language of images, we think they’re innocent and that we can read them easily, but no, we don’t. We are bombarded by images and these images are not innocent. They are out there in the world, and most of them exist to sell us something, whether it’s products or ideas. Their messages influences our vision of the world, they are our vision of the world. We are surrounded by a landscape of images we don’t know how to read. This work is a theatre built for a single image, and a model of thinking about an image, and that might suggest that all images should be thought about.

DS Why did you choose to work with this particular image?

AJ It was published in 1993 and when I saw it, I was shocked. It is maybe the most extraordinary image ever created in terms of articulating the widening gap between different worlds – between the so-called developed world and the so-called developing world. Kevin’s image captures so many things, including the criminal indifference of the developed world. That is why it provoked so many reactions when it was published, because it really goes to the essence of what’s happening with the imbalance that exists in the world.

DS Why do you produce this kind of work?

AJ I’ve been travelling pretty much nonstop since I was a kid, I’ve seen probably more than 100 countries. I have seen a lot of the world and it is clear to me that the world you and I live in is almost a work of fiction compared to the rest of the world. We are here dressed up, wearing shoes, we have access to food and entertainment and technology, it all seems so normal but this is not normal in the world at large. There have been extremely interesting developments in the world of technology such as the internet, but still 50% of the world population doesn’t have access to a telephone. When you’re aware of those gaps, of those dire imbalances, you have to do something about it. As an artist I am in the fortunate position of being given space to think about this, to think about society, and for me that is an incredible privilege, and it comes with a responsibility to think about the world. It is part of what I have to do, there’s no other way to say it.