We presented this series in November 2014, in the context of the Mois de la Photo in Paris. The series « Objets sous contrainte » by Jean-Robert Dantou was the first segment of the work entitled « The Walls don’t speak» about madness, an ongoing project which Dantou has been working on for years with a team of social scientists led by Florence Weber, a professor at the Ecole Normale Supérieure and a researcher at the Centre Maurice Halbwachs.
In the first segment, Jean-Robert Dantou chose to photograph objects that crystallize moments of decision-making and that bring us into the lives of people described as schizophrenic, bipolar, suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorders or depressive syndromes. With the idea of circumventing the spectacular thus bypassing the stigma, to make people appear behind these objects.
In the second section, they reflect on the boundaries of madness through a series of portraits in which patients and caregivers of a psychiatric nursing home are portrayed without distinction.
The third section is an essay combining photography and writing to question the limits of what can be photographed inside a closed psychiatric unit.
« Les Murs ne parlent pas » is a book of 344 pages edited by Kehrer Verlag.
BOOK
The Walls don’t speak
Jean-Robert Dantou / Florence Weber
Texts by Jean-Robert Dantou, Florence Weber with the participation of Solène Billaud, Pauline Blum, Julien Bourdais, Baptiste Brossard, Gaëlle Giordano, Hervé Heinry, Julie Minoc, Samuel Neuberg and William Vega
Postface by Christian Caujolle
Designed by Jean-Robert Dantou and Kehrer Design Heidelberg
Cloth hardcover
16,5 x 23 cm, 344 pages plus 24 page text leaflet, 122 color and 6 ills.
English/French
ISBN 978-3-86828-650-2
Euro 39,90
http://www.agencevu.com
http://www.kehrerverlag.com
