Many people discovered her at the Rencontres d’Arles in 2022. Mika Sperling was one of the winners of the Louis Roederer Foundation Discovery Prize, selected by photography historian Taous Dahmani. Her series Je n’ai rien fait de mal won the Public Prize. It is now being published by Actes Sud.
‘Ever since my first-born baby could walk, I’ve had a strong feeling of discomfort when I see her in the presence of elderly men. It is often when their own children are born that adults return to their past, or see it resurface without warning. It took Mika Sperling twenty years to face up to the shadow of her grandfather, the man who abused her for many years.
In the family album, she confines him to the status of a shadow, cutting out his silhouette to evoke the threat he may have represented and perhaps also to remove him forever from her life. In the photographs taken in the family setting, a young girl appears, sometimes smiling, sometimes reserved, alongside this taboo and cumbersome presence, ‘the elephant in the room’ as it would be called in England.
Some of the photographs are not revealed and are shown from the back, simply described in words that carry a lot of meaning: ‘We are in our grandfather’s living room. He’s sitting in his armchair with two girls on his lap. I’m one of them. His right hand is on my hip, his left hand on the other girl’s breast.
These family archives are set against more recent photographs taken by Mika Sperling on the path between her birthplace and her grandfather’s house. These are elusive snapshots that bring back memories. On a few pages, a baby appears, embodying the purity of childhood, which she saw vanish at a very young age but which must be preserve at all costs for her own daughter.
Between these images, a conversation takes place between the photographer and her grandfather, opening with the latter’s words: ‘I’ve done nothing wrong’. With the culprit now dead, this scenario is imagined. But it remains an outlet and a doorway to healing.
Mika Sperling – I Have Done Nothing Wrong
November, 2024
21.00 x 29.70 cm
156 pages
ISBN : 978-2-330-19488-8
29.00€
Available online and in all good bookstores
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