Pour la vie

Pour la vie takes visitors on a journey through portraits of struggling individuals or groups, bearing witness to photographic series initiated by Bruno Serralongue several years ago, to which new productions have been added.

He has been questioning, since the early 1990s, the uses and status of the photographic image, going out to meet the communities that are formed around a social and political event and the people who are fighting a battle on which their living conditions depend. The artist focuses on the backstage of the event and the traces left by it and thus offers a “displaced” point of view that questions the notion of objectivity of the photographic medium and the informative power of the image.

Whether it is a series on the migrant camps in Calais, begun in 2006, or more recently the struggle of North American First Nations against oil pipelines threatening their environment, or the defenders of the Jardins Ouvriers des Vertus in Aubervilliers threatened with destruction and the evicted occupants of a workers’ hostel in Saint-Ouen – in the run-up to the 2024 Olympics -, the exhibition interweaves the trajectories of individuals and the energy of the collective.

By inviting us to take the time to decipher what we see as well as what we do not see in the image and by leaving us free to interpret it, Bruno Serralongue’s photographs encourage us to question the notion of reality regarding what the media transmit to us.

• Bruno Serralongue