Secluded in villages or parked in reserves, they live far apart from the world. Mennonites by choice, Indians by limitations. In the two cases, they are confined to open sky. It is this way of life, being withdrawn into oneself, that interests me. These are the stigmas and confinement that I am trying to bring back on their faces.
A photographic portrait is, for me, before anything else, a ghost who looks at us, an absence from self and the world that stares at us. These faces, apart from their own ghost, have the ability to summon other phantoms.
Today’s Indians echo their ancestors, magnificently immortalized and idealized by Edward S. Curtis. The Mennonites recall the first puritan colonists. They are not strictly speaking about their descendants, but their very religious and rural way of life, their austere and worn faces. To me, they evoke faces of American history like certain portraits by Dorothea Lange or Walker Evans, who, like those of Curtis, created legends of American history.
Implicitly illustrating the ghosts of these mythic figures with faces marked by reclusion, by lives of constraint, it also evokes the distance between a fantasized representation of America that continues to rage and an often even harsher reality.
“No man is an island, entire of itself/ Every man is a piece of continent”- John Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, 1624.
Marion Gronier
Marion Gronier, No Man Is An Island
Through November 26, 2016
Central Dupon Images
74, rue Joseph de Maistre
75018 Paris
France
