Coping

What we see here makes us think of our daily lives in a strange way.

And yet these photographers have worked up until now in more turbulent parts of the world. Far from our ordinary lives. Close (or so we thought) to the “real” issues, the “real” problems.

Here, what we discover to our surprise is mostly stories that take the form of private or family diaries, of restricted walks.

But if we really think about it, was what they were doing before so remarkable? Wasn’t it, on the contrary, as normal and obvious as what human beings do day after day, and have always done: going to the frontline of their own lives, occupying the place for which they are destined, by circumstance or by vocation?

Coping.

For some, it happens in a harsh, mineral light. For others, in a shimmering darkness where the buds seem to cry out. For others still, the roots are exposed, the flow of life is broken, the city becomes a frightening ghost town, a bird falls far from the trees.

And always the fragility of the two extremes. The child. The grandparent. The two unite, defying the orders that try to separate them, refusing the abrupt segregation of the generations. They rest side by side, their sleep either troubled or deep. They are entrusted to us. They illuminate us.

But what about us?

What of the generation in the middle, torn between compassion and anxiety, gentleness and harassment? Who are we, what are we becoming?

Adults.

Etymologically: creatures who have reached the end of their growth. Or at least who are coming to the end of a form of growth. Who identify this end in the state of the world and in their own lives.

Because of circumstances, this stage is being experienced in a kind of withdrawal. A third place.

A place from which something else may emerge. Something that is barely visible, but can rather be sensed in the vibration of the image. Something swaddled in beauty, emptiness and patience, which points, by antiphrasis, to another frontline, absent from the image because unapproachable.

The frontline of the unconfined, the emergency doctors, the nurses whose days used to be structured, their work organised, their tasks identified, and who today find themselves fighters with no chance of retreat, no protection and no witness other than abstract statistics and the news bulletins that beat away at citizens day after day, hour after hour, minute after minute.

At the same time, photographers who chose lives of instability and risk in faraway places are now forbidden, by public health decree, from going to those places in their own environment where the most dangerous forms of suffering are present: in the enclosure of domestic violence, in the supercharged surroundings of the hospital, the retirement home, the business threatened with bankruptcy, in the stifling limits of cramped apartments.

Here they are, these witnesses through the image, powerless to document anything other than what disrupts, or, by default, structures their own confinement.

Confronted with the disarray of governments, the confusion of scientists, the mobilisation of every available carer, they have suddenly become people who take care, day by day, of their nearest and dearest.

Vigilant.

Persistent

Connected.

(translated by Howard Curtis)