Facing death

by Christian Ingrao
Research director at the CNRS
Director of the Institute of the History of the Present Time

"In I was Dead, the photographer Grégoire Korganow, involved in a bad street accident in 2007, decided to look at the men and women who saved him.
 
It is rare that a book has such an accurate title, like a banner, rare also that a book explores in such depth the daily life of a Western society which has forgotten its end-of-life scenarios, its emergencies. Between an aesthetic which cannot be qualified -- which would be the worst thing that could happen to this book— and a referential universe so rich it is difficult to grasp all its parts, Korganow becomes the photographer of the interstitial paroxysm in a French society one does not see in the same way afterward. Landscapes, sequences, different protagonists (what an ugly word) appear in these sixty black & white photos accompanied by short texts, compact, succinct, like a war journal. Grégoire Korganow first began working as a reporter in 1992, following changes in the former Soviet bloc, in Russia, in the former Yugoslavia, in Albania. In 1993, he began a nearly ten year collaboration with Libération. Hid photographic work showed his commitment and his sensitivity to the multiple aspects of our time. He shot a series of portraits of fathers with their sons; intimate work about time, kinship, and their effect on the body. A survivor of a terrible road accident in 2007, he decided to focus on those who saved him ...
 
Grégoire Korganow tracks trauma in society, which allots spaces and temporal sequences in order to repress it: the space was the poor northern suburbs of Paris, inspiring panic in the minds of the Parisian elite, where 1.5 million people live, love, tear each other apart and die. Time is about being in the field (he spent a year accompanying the teams from the SMUR of Gonesse as they went about treating people), it is the razor-thin line separating life from one’s last breath, sweating through cardiac massages, the sound of the metal saws which are used to extract victims of road violence, the smell of dead bodies abandoned and found some time later, the tears and gasps of those in the midst of all this, the shock felt by the men and women who chose this as their profession, who are there and have paid the price. The subversive strength of J’étais mort (I was dead) has to do with the engaging of the reader’s five senses as he or she reads the text and contemplates the powerful photos.
 
Should we compare the photos of Grégoire Korganow to the paintings of Georges de la Tour, as their negatives? La Tour, who lived in the Lorraine region during the Thirty Years War (1618‑1648), through the Plague and the appearance of war mercenaries; the painter, described by Johan Huizinga as “the bitter taste of life,” transfigured the period into a study of shadows and light. Facing the gravity of the time, in which we are reminded that 90% of the Germanic population was dead or dying during the Thirty Years War and the “misfortunes of the time”— La Tour responded by taking refuge in religious painting, evoking the Word.
 
Grégoire Korganow chose the absolute opposite direction: facing a society so afraid of its cracks, its wounds that it hides them in corners —meaning end of life situations, the habitat, the hospital, the ambulance, the scary suburbs, the paramedics of the SMUR, the firefighters. Grégoire Korganow placed himself exactly where, perhaps for the last time, one may see these individuals up close and personal … facing a society which wants to ignore all of it, Korganow reveals it. He transfigures the tension, the emergency into a series of photographs of amaxing beauty, in a nearly Christ-like fashion.
 
J’étais mort is also a book of disturbing text, beautifully presented by the publisher, Editions Le Clou dans le Fer, a small Champagne-area publishing house whose audacity and radicality channel the beauty of its expression.
 
The silent lesson, therefore, from these two artists —as it is unlikely they would go for this particular text — comes from the great René Char, the poet/ warrior, who often contemplated a well-known painting of Job and his wife (in which the wife seems to be chastising Job) by de La Tour, which hung in his room in the village of Céreste. What de La Tour and Korganow tell us, is that “in the depths of our gloom, there is no room for beauty. Beauty should be everywhere."

Christian Ingrao
author of Believe and Destroy: Intellectuals in the SS war machine, Fayard, 2010.
Text published in www.Slate.fr October 25, 2010