Red-haired snapper Pascal Sacleux has produced a mosaic of stunning portraits of 30 fellow gingers to stress that endless jokes about red hair are no laughing matter and lead to bullying.

Sacleux wants to promote “la roussitude” (ginger-ness, or ginger-pride, taken from the “negritude” movement), encouraging those born with the world’s rarest hair colour to feel proud to be different.

He said, “It’s a form of racism that has persisted for centuries. Many red-heads have really been hurt growing up, and some are destroyed socially.”

The exhibition is entitled “Brittany: Freckles Rock” and the portraits aim to show the beauty of red-heads in the historically Celtic region of western France where many of the country’s red-heads live.

The exhibition has attracted 3,500 euro in crowd funding to have the portraits printed onto large canvasses to form a mosaic in an airport hall.