Photographer Finds His American ‘Eden’
EDEN, North Carolina — The trees were turning yellow, orange and brown one recent day in this town of some 15,000 people. Something about the fall palette and the once-bustling streets lined by rows of shuttered businesses strongly suggested the work of the photographer William Eggleston and his knack for forlorn, deadpan details.
The name Eden seems overly optimistic, especially in the wake of the recent closing of the local MillerCoors brewery.
But this atmosphere was exactly what the French-born photographer Sylvain Couzinet-Jacques was look- ing for when he moved to the town because of its name, and lived here for months to observe life and customs, like a 21st- century Alexis de Tocqueville, the French chronicler of early 19th- century American life.
It seemed an unlikely place for an art event, but here was Mr. Couzinet-Jacques hosting a couple dozen neighbors at a party to celebrate his rehabilitation of the Little Red Schoolhouse. He bought the 1884 structure a year and a half ago for less than $1,000 when it was abandoned and falling apart. He has painstakingly renovated it and most recently painted it an alarmingly bright red color — not the classic schoolhouse maroon, but the color of caution, a toxic Edenic apple.
“It’s a pure object, a sculpture,” Mr. Couzinet- Jacques said of the schoolhouse.
The building has been the subject of his photographs and obsessive documentation for the past year. “There is a paradise here, but it’s lost,” he said of Eden. “I wanted to bring about a re- enchantment through art.”
Mr. Couzinet-Jacques has tried to import that magic for “Eden,” a new exhibition at the Aperture Foundation in New York that runs through January 19. The show is sponsored by the Fondation d’Enterprise Hermès, the charitable arm of the fashion company, which gave Mr. Couzinet-Jacques a grant of about $42,000 to create “Eden” for its “Immersion” series of French-American photography commissions.
The multimedia installation in Aperture’s gallery includes some 20 photographs of the schoolhouse and its environs. Mr. Couzinet- Jacques turned a phrase from the property deed (“foundations are bricks and some boulders”) into a Tracey Emin- like neon work, rendered in his own handwriting. And he has reconstructed parts of its rickety porch.
When he was nominated for the Hermès commission in late 2014, he at first proposed an American road trip. But he overhauled his idea.
“I didn’t want to stay in a hotel for just a week and take some tacky pho- tos,” Mr. Couzinet- Jacques said. “I wanted to live, as much as possible, an American life.”
His parents are teachers, and Mr. Couzinet- Jacques grew up living above a school for part of his childhood in the Burgundian town of Sens. After learning that a schoolhouse was available, “I took it as a sign,” he said.
Mr. Couzinet-Jacques has mostly stayed in motels and a rented house and dipped into personal funds.
He doesn’t drive, and often traversed Eden by bike and on foot, which baffled residents. “They call me ‘ the walker,’ ” Mr. Couzinet-Jacques said.
His embrace of the town has been mutual. Over wine and beer at the Eden party, several residents said that any old building’s being saved was a good thing.
Mr. Couzinet-Jacques isn’t so sure Eden’s trajectory is upward, but he knows that it will be the proudly eccentric citizens, not old buildings, that give it hope. “I’ve been all over the U.S.,” he said. “But there are such characters down here.”