Collecting anonymous photographs has been at the heart of Emmanuelle Fructus’s work for several years. In 2006, she created Un livre – une image, a structure that allowed her to explore family photography through the acquisition of documentary image collections. Observing, listing and classifying these poor images made her think about amateur photography: a lot of images produced in large numbers, stereotyped and banal. These hundreds of thousands of images are generally neglected, and that’s where Emmanuelle Fructus’ work begins: to find a place for them.
51
Vintage silver prints mounted on wood
25 x 41 x 30 cm
9 7/8 x 16 1/8 x 11 3/4 in
2019
Unique piece
Like a seamstress, Emmanuelle Fructus tirelessly cuts out anonymous photographic figures with a pair of scissors. She extracts these human forms (selected by feet, detachable, relatively sharp and, as far as possible, without any object in their hands) from their context. Each one is repositioned in a neutral space with no history. In this way, all these signs, extracted from their original images and reassembled like lists of names, carry within them the silence of their intimate history and that of our history. Beneath this apparent rigour of classification, the rich colours of black and white and the unspeakable stories of these photographed individuals become the very subject of his collages.