Foreword
In a long-term care facility, forty-five people are living, all suffering from severe degenerative diseases. One hundred doctors and nurses work at the facility. It has taken four years to create these portraits during which time three of the eleven voluntary residents have died : Laurent, Olivier and Julien.
Synopsis
Along one thousand metres of corridors, the residents, in their electric wheelchairs come and go quietly. Each of them have a room, their cocoon, their universe, holding on to their memories and passions. Silence predominates, the movement hardly perceptible, speech is difficult, even sometimes impossible as the disease slowly evolves. The extreme dependence is omnipresent and the denouement is known.
It is a world apart, where the perception of time and space is altered: sometimes compressed, sometimes distended.
In their own care bedroom, this photographic representation is first of all the expression of one of their dream, wish, or fantasy. Once restrained, this thought occupies the whole physical space of the room; it invades it to reach a representation in which the imagination supplants the human condition.
Further Information
After holding meetings and interviews for one year, I realised these eleven photographs over a period of two and a half years. Each portrait required two to three months of preparation of which two days were on-site dressing the medical room for the photographic session. The people present in these photographs are not disguised extras. The photographs are processed in a conventional way without any form of digital alteration.
Christophe Hargoues
From March 11 through April 2, 2017
Les photographiques 2017
Centre des Expositions Paul Courboulay
Rue Paul Courboulay
72100 Le Mans
France
http://www.photographiques.org/
