FAMILY ALBUM

cuttings and administrative documents, his photographs were about the American chemicals and agribusiness giant Monsanto. Focusing on case studies, he pointed up the company’s responsibility in sanitary and environmental disasters in the U.S. but also abroad (“agent orange,” the defoliant that was dropped in industrial quantities during the Vietnam War; continues to cause malformation in the descendants of the Vietnamese and Americans who were exposed to it). For his part, Mathieu Pernot presented a family album, showing the Gorgans, Gypsies from Arles whose life has interweaved with his own, and his work, since he met them in the mid-1990s, moved by that interest in marginals within society that underpins many of his series. His images show the children growing up and the parents getting old. They bear witness to family events, like the death of the son Rocky, but also, implicitly, the rising living standards of some of the family members, characterized, notably, by the move from caravan to apartment. The exhibition placed on the same level photographs from well-established series such as Les Hurleurs (2001-04)—those silhouettes trying to communicate with their imprisoned kin, several of whom are sons of Gorgan exchanging with their father—, portraits that he made, and snapshots that were entrusted to him. He combined these on big walls covered with images, each one constituting the portrait of one of the family members, like so many prisms that, far from the usual generalizations about the Gypsies, seemed to want to assert their irreducible singularity. Finally, Samuel Gratacap tended rather more classically towards reportage.True, the works made between 2014 and 2016 in Libya, and more particularly in the northwestern part of the country, were not designed for publication in the media, but they look like obvious candidates for the broadsheet press, such is their focus on the migratory crisis and the explosion of this country whose reconstruction seems so precarious a hope. In a kind of collaborative and immersive documentary, he integrated images swapped with another photographer—Mansur, an amateur photographer who documented the drowning of migrants at Zouara—and organized his exhibition around aural testimony that enveloped it and attempted to give speech back to the subjects of his images, when photography, as he might view it, is “without a voice.” There is a big gap between photographic investigation and a family album, but if their genres and methods differed, these works had in common a formal splintering and narrative fragmentation that was not so obvious in the other documentary propositions at this year’s festival. Gideon Mandel, on climate change, or the duo Niels Ackermann and Sébastien Gobert, on the de-communization of Ukraine, where they are pulling down the statues of Lenin, did sometimes feature postcards or family photographs, but they never Carlos Ayesta & Guillaume Bression. De la série « Mauvais rêves?». 2013.

(Court. les artistes et galerie 247) managed to get away from the repetitive mode of photographic series—precisely where Asselin, Pernot and Gratacap multiplied and intercut sources and registers of images envisaged as fluid materials. How should we interpret these renewed documentary practices, their use of archive, testimony and vernacular imagery? No doubt they reflect the photographers’ desire to get as close as possible to the subject, but also an attempt to escape the authority of their own point of view.

(1) These three projects have given rise

to three books: Mathieu Asselin, Monsanto : une enquête photographique (Actes Sud, 55 euros), Mathieu Pernot, les Gorgan 1995-2015 (Xavier Barral, 45 euros) and Samuel Gratacap, Fifty-fifty

(Gwinzegal, 20 euros). See also Dhikav,

les bords du fleuve, Pernot’s film about the Gorgans (La Traverse).