Room 207, the book by French photographer Jean-Michel André, published by Actes Sud, is the winner of the 2024 Nadar-Gens d’Images Prize.
In the summer of 1983, Jean-Michel André was seven years old. He went on vacation to Corsica with his father, his father’s new partner, and her daughter. On the night of August 5th, they decided to stop at the Sofitel hotel in Avignon. The children slept in Room 207, adjacent to the parents’ room. At 3:30 a.m., a robbery attempt turned into a massacre, and seven guests were murdered, including his father and his father’s partner. That night, in Room 207, Jean-Michel André “left behind [his] memory and [his] childhood.”
To cope with the shock of this tragic event, his psyche erased it from his memory. The only memories he has of his father now are a few objects and, most importantly, photographs. Photography took on a central role in his life from a very early age: “Photography is my anchor, my breath, my way of experiencing life and sensitivity.”
Forty years later, Jean-Michel André decided to summon the memories of that night, which altered his life and the lost memory of his father. He envisioned Room 207 as a film, a “visual essay that is as much about reconstitution as it is about reconstruction,” as described by photography historian Clément Chéroux in his afterword. The photographer combines archival photographs—family photos, press clippings, investigative images, objects belonging to his father—with recent shots taken in Avignon at the scene of the tragedy, as well as in places he might have visited with his father: Corsica, Senegal…
In these ethereal images, birds play an important role. For him, they evoke “taking flight, freedom, and travel.” This project is also “an invitation to journey.” His images offer a poetic vision of reality, through which he seeks to “exorcise trauma and move towards the light.”
The book pulses with a subtle poetry, restrained rather than overtly emotional. Jean-Michel André revisits this tragedy with the quiet dignity that defines him: “I work on the edges, on the wire, like a tightrope walker moving forward, trying not to fall, staying focused.”
Jean-Michel André – Chambre 207
October 2024
21.00 x 29.70 cm
152 pages
ISBN : 978-2-330-19674-5
39.00€
Available online and in all good bookstores.
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