Immigrant Song - October 2017
The inhumanity of Trump’s policy against immigrants has aroused my anger. It has inspired me to continue 4stones, the project I started 15 years ago.
For this new series, I invite immigrants living around me in New York City to arrange four pebbles any way they like. Then I quickly shoot a picture to record the stones’ position. Later, I reproduce the composition and make my final photograph.
Immigrant Song consists of pairs of photographs, each one including the portrait of an immigrant and a still life of the arrangement he or she made with the four stones. Next, I also ask my guests to write, in their own hand, something about how it feels to be an immigrant.
I photograph my subjects using a Holga plastic lens, which lacks definition, to transcribe some of the loss of identity. To print my images, I use an alcohol transfer process on silkscreen paper that symbolizes the movement from one country to another and from one life to another. It can be unpredictable like the immigration process and show some unexpected results. Because of that, each print is unique. Arches 88, the watercolor paper I print on, is made by Canson, the art supplier of my childhood in France.
