A road in a bluish blizzard, a close-up of a phone booth, a gas pump or a motel sign lit up in red, like the track of a wheel in the snow, looking bloody... like the fingers of a hand, also taken in close-up... Red, too, like the leatherette of an empty car seat, also shot in close-up, or the files clutched by a man with a lost gaze... Using leitmotifs, echoes and repetitions, the photography of Kourtney Roy (b. 1981) is intrinsically obsessive because it is aesthetically obsessive. Obsessive through motifs (deserted roads, signs, skies, nights, fog, snow...), colors (predominantly blood-red and pool-blue) and framing (essentially close-ups or extra-wide shots).
If, in her self-portraits, the photographer is at the service of a fantasy bordering on the zany, in her series The Other end of the rainbow, she is at the service of suspense... and, if not pathos (virtuously avoided by a highly masterful use of the unspoken and the hidden), at least dread and empathy for the victims to whom tribute is paid here. A sort of tragic culmination of the fictional worlds created by the Canadian photographer over the years, the subject addressed in this series is indeed dramatic: for over forty years, along Highway 16, a road in northern British Columbia (Canada's most westerly province), women and girls have been disappearing, most of them from the First Nations (Canada's aboriginal peoples). Between 2017 and 2019, Kourtney Roy focused her lens on this 720-km stretch of road, dubbed the "Highway of Tears", to photograph the places that witnessed the tragedies.
" How do you give meaning to an insignificant place?" she asked herself. "The banality of the places I photographed suggests the presence of sinister events as much as it hides it."
In her quest for genius loci, that "genius of place" "which gives meaning to a particular place", the photographer has succeeded in rendering almost palpable the strange feeling of a presence permeating, from one end to the other, this Road of Tears. A long-term project, on the borderline between artistic and documentary photography, this "storytelling through images of a news item" takes on the appearance of a narrative puzzle in the Les Filles du Calvaire gallery, which presents extracts accompanied by testimonies gathered during the artist's travels.
A book published by Editions André Frère presents it in its entirety.
" THE OTHER END OF THE RAINBOW" - LES FILLES DU CALVAIRE
17, RUE DES FILLES-DU-CALVAIRE, PARIS 3E
UNTIL FEBRUARY 24 (CLOSED FROM JANUARY 15 TO 25)
LESFILLESDUCALVAIRE.COM
