Images Plurielles publishes the book by Georges Pacheco & Estelle Granet: Mānouches – A journey with the descendants of Didi and Canette Duville.
From 2019 to 2023, Georges Pacheco, photographer, and Estelle Granet, author, traveled through five departments to meet a large family of Travelers, the Duvilles. An artistic and human journey which led them in the footsteps of the descendants of Émile Duville known as Didi. Born in 1897 he died in 1991, the latter is an emblematic character of the Manouches of Central and Western France, as well as an important tutelary figure for the family. It is therefore with him and his wife, Eugénie Gaisne known as Canette (1895-1975), in mind that this work was carried out.
The Duville family is representative of a particular way of life, that of the Manouches known as travellers who still move from village to village and often do not stop in the dedicated rest areas. But this way of life is changing today. The gradual abandonment of horses and then trailers, in favor of caravans, changed their way of traveling and being together. The different branches of the family meet less often and elders often report difficulties in transmitting family history orally. This is what first made Georges Pacheco and Estelle Granet want to engage in this artistic adventure consisting of building traces with the family, a memory to share and transmit.
In order to carry out the Mānouches project, they transformed a caravan into a traveling photographic studio. Touring reception areas and improvised camp sites, they invited the descendants of Didi and Canette to pose for an individual portrait, to share their story, to share testimonies and memories and to discuss their family albums.
During these four years, more than four hundred people were photographed in front of a neutral background that was the same for everyone, a space in which everyone could reveal something of their uniqueness and represent themselves freely. A device which goes against the grain of the anthropometric portraits formerly made for the purposes of control and registration, by allowing people to re-appropriate the act of being photographed, to show themselves as they see themselves and not in a constrained manner.
At the same time, dozens of hours of interviews, cross-referenced with various archive documents, made it possible to develop, with the family, a shared story, a story in the form of an epic. Two centuries separate Jean-Baptiste, a traveling dentist born in 1793 in Haut-Rhin, and Levy who, seven generations later, in Sarthe, questions his life and his future. Between them, a whole gallery of characters unfolds who, each in turn, embody the journey of this family. A unique journey which constantly intersects and responds to great History.
Georges Pacheco : Mānouches – A journey with the descendants of Didi and Canette Duville
Published by Images Plurielles
Text: Estelle Granet
Preface: Ilsen About, historian
276 pages including 80 pages of text illustrated with archive images
230 photographs in color and black and white
Canvas cover and hot stamping
Format 20×28 cm
€43
https://www.imagesplurielles.com/fr/livres/127-manouches.html
