| Marie-Hélène Le Ny |
1995/1996 |
photographer |
|
The human being
and his behavior is in the heart of my questioning and of my
curiosity. I cannot, as artist, to abstract me from the world
to consider only the forms and the colors. On the contrary, I
need to dive into the society of the human beings, to observe
it, to dissect it. It is my raw material. Concerned by its wanderings,
I want to make visual propositions which start resonating with
it and which carry questioning. The North / Pas-de-Calais is a region the history of which reminds us the big events undergone by the man for two centuries, those connected to the industrial revolution which allowed the emergence of our modern societies, those connected to the last armed conflicts that knew Western Europe, and those engendered by the current socioeconomic difficulties. She allows us to problèmatiser the relationship war-peace, the working notion, and the importance of the transmission of the memory between the generations for the construction of the future. All these questions question the choices of development of the western societies - so much point of view political as economic or social, and the connections which they establish between the people. Questioning the notion of the future, and pressing me on the random access memory of the region, I realized portraits on 3 generations: the one who knew the last war, the one who lived the mine in everyday life, and that of the young people of today. For every photographed person, I made a "portrait" of the right hand. Coming to fit between portraits, photos of objects - sorts of portraits of the things of the life of the characters. At least for the oldest both generations, for which the time made the sorting between the objects which pass, and those who stay as touchstone of the memory. For the youngest, it is their feeling on the future which I wanted to register, their words, their expressions, what haunts them... |