Pierre Gonnord, again.
Remarkable portrait photography speaks about an isolated moment that has relevance as part of the story of the person being photographed. But even more, good portraits speak about the human condition, its diversity, its commonality and its relevance to who we are as people and what we make out of our societies. In many ways, good portrait photography is about the transcendence of human nature. It is a narrative that connects the photographer with the viewer and the subject and then relates these individualities with the rest of the social influences that define them.
It follows that I love to refer -again- to the work of Pierre Gonnord, it is truly remarkable.
I choose my contemporaries in the anonymity of the big cities because their faces, under the skin, narrate unique and remarkable stories about our era. Sometimes hostile, almost always vulnerable and very often wounded behind the opaqueness of their mask, they embody at once specific social realities and a different concept of beauty. I search for individuals that seem unclassifiable and timeless, suggesting that the play of human condition has been repeated over and over since the beginning of time. I would like to encourage the crossing of a mental border [...] I search in the meting points of the urban scene: streets, squares, cafes, stations, universities [...] then further still in the peripheral districts, laces so isolated from the world, and in more marginal settings such as prisons, hospitals, social shelters, rehabilitation centers, monasteries, or circuses. Because our society is there as well.
