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live from the SMUR

by Philippe Petit
Journalist, essayist, philosopher
 
“Last April, you may remember Martine Aubry’s speech on “the society of health care,” which went viral. It was a trigger for the press to begin focusing on the subject. Reflections dealing with “new vulnerabilities” are now finally being given emphasis and importance. The issues of poverty and insecurity are no longer academic subjects and the concept of health care has become a touchstone for social reflection which has been running on empty for awhile, although it is not at all a new idea.
 
Examining health care is a means of revealing a world of invisible inequities, its daily reality. The ER docs and paramedics, first responders, first contacts for the injured and the sick -- keep us in contact with the fragility of life. They show us what is behind the curtain in the spaces where they are working. The photographer Grégoire Korganow, whose images are currently being exhibited in Perpignan, is part of this process. Health care: he was there, in fact he barely survived. After a serious motorcycle accident, he was saved by a Mobile Service for Emergency & Intensive Care, (the acronym SMUR in French). He wanted to express his gratitude, joining the SMUR teams in Gonesse.
 
The title of the book is J’étais mort (I was dead). Like the director of the emergency department at the Hospital said, this is not a voyeur’s book, in fact it is the exact opposite. And he took his time shooting, photographing the indescribable, destitution, turmoil, quirky things -- and he also wrote text to accompany the images, putting faces to the hands which treated him and the voices which helped him emerge from a coma. The result is astonishing -- had he not been a photojournalist, one might think he was a portrait photographer. If he had not been a real photographer, he might have been a prose writer. The scenes he shows and describes are like sudden slashes of light piercing the dark shadows, revealing the destitution and emptiness of the human condition. These are not just clever live shots -- to do it right, the photograph must step back from the visible, yet allow the scene to be seen. Soothing, speaking, intervening, trying the impossible, expecting the worst, this can be seen. The intensity of the way people are staring, the precision of their movements, the capturing of the atmosphere, this is also visible. But since the visible is also close to the invisible, both movements need to weigh in, which is what happens in Korganow’s work. The doctors, the nurses, the firemen -- all hard at work, securing the patient, and what they may not perceive in the action, we see in their place. What do we pick up on? A hidden, primitive scene which we may call the social construction of care, of treatment. In these terrible situations, inside houses, at the bottom of a flight of stairs, seeing these broken bodies, these are lives, which seem more fragile than others. Indeed it is for these reasons that the photographer shares with us the dialogues between the doctors, the patients and members of their families. For example Nono, a doctor, trying to comfort a woman whose husband has just killed himself, “We’re never ready, we think we are but it isn’t true.” What is true, however, is that it doesn’t take much time doing this work to fully grasp the weight of a life. A stroke involves questioning the family, getting information about the victim’s life and work, this helps to reveal what has gone on behind the scenes. But the photos are not posed, he took them on the fly, framed by the situations in real time, so it took Korganow a year to find and share with us these moments. For a man who was (nearly) dead, a year seems about the right amount of time … "
 
Philippe Petit
Editor in chief of the weekly magazine Marianne
Producer of “New pathways to knowledge” on France culture radio
About J'étais mort, published in 2010 by Editions Le clou dans le fer