The Canadian photographer Kourtney Roy presents her new book published by the Éditions la Pionnière. Northern Noir was photographed during the summer and winter of 2015 in Northern Ontario and British Columbia, Canada. My intent was to create a series of film stills taken from an unknown and fictional film, more precisely, a crime film. I wanted to photograph the non-events that encircle the places where transgressive acts may have taken place. The banality of the scenes photographed both hides and yet hints at the presence of shady and malevolent happenings. These fragments capture unintentional and marginal details. Their mundane and anecdotal qualities are fetishized and magnified, adding a sense of dread to the otherwise indifferent and un-extraordinary scenes.
The series was realised over several road trips through the wilderness and towns of my youth. I chose to create this series in Canada, because I wanted to bring the dimension of memory to the work in order to enable the images to operate on different levels of significance. The facet of memory, my memory, real or imagined, links itself to the screen memories of the film still. The road is not only a physical space but also a space of the imagination, a state of mind where past and present convene. These stills of a nameless film intertwine with the aura of a specific place and time, melding the impervious with the personal. The ghost of space haunts our imagination.
Within these familiar and rural locales that I photographed I utilized myself to engage the body’s capacity for improvisation and performance in order to create strange and unexpected disturbances within otherwise banal scenes. This method of photography regularly relies on the vagaries of chance: “accidents” that arise during my ambulatory search for sites and situations. The regular use of myself as the main protagonist in my work allows for the literal fragmentation and deconstruction of identity. The doubling and redoubling of these characters is a playful concealment and revelation of a shifting and intangible subject. The result is that both the narrative and subject are presented as boundless possibilities, an infinity of anecdotes bordering the real and the fantastic.
BOOK
Northern Noir
Photographs by Kourtney Roy
33,5 x 24 cm, 64 pages
ISBN : 978-2-908092-78-3
49 euros
http://www.lapionniere.com
http://www.kourtneyroy.com
