True History has as many nuances as there are protagonists and many of them go unnoticed by our eyes. But not for the French photographer Mathieu Pernot (1972), who throughout his prolific career has given voice to those who live on the margins of our society and has shown uncomfortable realities with an unconventional sensitivity. He, like other greats of photography, has always known how to set his objective on other lives and other landscapes, giving rise to a different vision of social reality.
A large part of the images captured during his more than thirty-year career, from the early nineties to the present, have been brought together by Fundación MAPFRE in Madrid in the exhibition Document/Monument, the artist’s first retrospective in Spain. The exhibition, which can be visited in the Sala Recoletos until next January 7, exemplifies the evolution of Pernot’s photography, a work in constant transformation that draws from various sources and that has always remained open to new interpretations.
To create many of his photographic series, Mathieu Pernot uses material from different types of archives: historical, family, personal and albums. These found images mix and dialogue with those of the author himself, who on numerous occasions does not make a distinction between his origins. Thus, his style poses a deep reflection on the role of the photographer and the different functions of the photographic medium.
Migrants, members of the gypsy community and displaced people are some of the protagonists of their work. “Pernot presents us with their concrete, everyday lives, far from the great stories of history and their more or less tragic events. All of these characters mix and intersect in their series and works over the years, creating an artistic discourse that proposes new and different readings of our own history,” explains Victoria del Val, curator of the exhibition. An example of this is Los Gorgan, one of the fundamental works that accompanies Pernot from the beginning of his photographic activity until 2023.
Pernot met the Gorgan family in 1995, when he was studying at the National School of Photography in Arles. Its members have become the main figures of the photographer’s artistic discourse, both because of the magnetism of its members and because their lives intersect with the history of the gypsy community throughout the centuries. Thus, this family is present in different spaces of the exhibition. This is the case of the series El fuego (2013), a set of photographs that the author took at dusk and whose protagonists, with a serious face, are only illuminated by a bonfire.
Furthermore, in this retrospective made up of nearly 300 works, projects created by Pernot at different times and that in some cases had not been seen until now are listed. Thus, the images taken in the boxing clubs of Marseille in 1994 stand out, taken in a training room and made with the same approach, background and combat posture, and the most recent series made a few months ago in Melilla on behalf of the Foundation. MAPFRE, and which has served to capture the fenced and adjacent border landscape from another perspective.
Also on display for the first time are his photographs of the destroyed and damaged buildings of Beirut in 2000, where his father grew up and where the artist traveled after the long Lebanese civil war. Those buildings with shrapnel marks and reduced to rubble reflect a reality loaded with symbolism. “The photographic medium is the expression of a loss, the presence of an absence shows what no longer exists at the moment of the past photograph. The melancholy of the photograph doubles that of the ruin represented,” said the author.
Pernot’s exhibition makes use of the impact that observing almost opposite images in the same space can always generate. Two of the most notable antagonisms exhibited is the contrast between the Brave New World and Implosions/Clouds series. While the first shows what were once postcards of ideal, repetitive and impersonal urban complexes, the second discovers that those same places, made up of collapsing buildings, are today the testimony of the failure of a social utopia.
In addition, the series Those Who Scream, where relatives of inmates from the prisons of Avignon, Marseille or Barcelona are represented trying to communicate with them from outside the walls, is exhibited together with the graphic material from the Parisian prison of La Santé, made up of a collage of images with inscriptions written by prisoners in their cells, images that they used to decorate them, as well as record books from the Penitentiary Administration.
Document/Monument demonstrates that Pernot’s photographs not only reflect different temporalities and geographies, but are in constant connection and movement within the exhibition hall itself. “From the tradition of documentary photography, his images mix and dialogue with archival funds to end up creating a very original point of view and, above all, far from conventional and univocal visions,” says Victoria del Val. This stimulating exhibition is completed with a selection of books that highlights the importance of editorial production in the artist’s career.
