For The Unseen Eye, discovering an unfamiliar new talent is one of the very great pleasures of attending Arles or the other good photo festivals around the world. A very wise man once told the Eye that “you must look at everything”, and as unreasonable as that seems, he was right. Once you realize that you have stumbled on to something new and great, a wave of relief and pleasure – joy if you will – seeps through you.
Ongoing through September at the Rencontres d’Arles are David Fathi and The Last Road of the Immortal Woman, an installation honoring the legacy of Henrietta Lacks, an African-American woman from Maryland whose cancer cells offered a medical breakthrough in cancer research. Part of that legacy is the medical establishment’s complete failure to celebrate or to compensate her.
The artist writes: “The last road of the immortal woman is where Henrietta Lacks is no longer alive, but not yet immortal. It’s the space separating what a human life is, and can be. A funeral march for Henrietta Lacks, but a new beginning for her cells.”
The installation is ironically and rather thoughtlessly located in the back of one of most nondescript, unattractive venues at the Rencontre. You really have to be looking to find it.
There is a darkened corridor with 7 framed photographs, 5 large text panels, 1 video, 2 neon signs (“Mortality” and “Immortality”) and some wall text. It is heart breaking and fascinating. The photographs are hazy, matte, black and white night-scapes, some with seeming magenta ectoplasm mysteriously hanging in the trees. The color is an artist’s intervention. The text panels are initially inscrutable but then reveal a bounty of information – by intention too much – forensic descriptions of how Lacks’ cells have been used in research or how her legacy has been abused.
Fathi who is French but who spent his early years in the US, has a sense of theatre and amazement that is welcome. The Arles commission is a result of his receiving the Photo Folio Award last year.
The Last Road has not been published in book form yet as the artist is still searching for the appropriate platforms to present this work. His earlier projects “Anecdotal” and “Wolfgang” exist as smart, handsome books.
The former is about nuclear testing and accidents, illustrated with what looks to be archival material that has been mediated by the artist, and the latter is based, of all things, on one of the founders of quantum physics. Fathi has degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science and appears to walk a very creative line between fact and fiction.
The work has been seen at a number of festivals. Keep your eyes open. This guy is astonishing.
Mr. Fathi is represented by La Galerie Particulière in France and East Wing in Dubai.
W.M. Hunt
W.M. Hunt writes as The Unseen Eye. He is an occasional contributor and an original supporter of The Eye of Photography.
David Fathi, The Last Road of the Immortal Woman
Through September 24, 2017
Rencontres d’Arles
Arles, France
