2024-02-03 04:28:56
On Saturday March 2 and Sunday March 3, the musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac is organizing a new edition of “Ethnology will surprise you!” on the theme of the body. Partner of the event, “Libération” will publish on Monday February 26 a supplement in the daily newspaper and a special file to be found on our site.
Often, he is the man “on the ground”, closest to the subjects he photographs. Camilo León Quijano, born in Colombia and researcher at the University of Aix-Marseille following passing through Bologna, Bordeaux and EHESS in Paris, does not see things differently. At the heart of his approach as an anthropologist, photography is not only a soulful supplement to the field notebook, an illustration. It is a true “complement”, a “means of investigation”, “a form which allows us to understand the city” and to dynamite, in the process, the expected representations. For his thesis work, he chose to “see and hear” Sarcelles “beyond the asphalt”.
“The photos that I offer are not those that we expect from a suburb, with its very codified hegemonic forms, linked to violence and drugs,” continues Camilo León Quijano. The residents immediately caught my attention as a Colombian outsider.” They told him: “We are fed up with miserabilist representations of us as people who have no power of action.” The wide angle lens which brings you close to the group, the black and white which focuses without distracting, the low angle which gives strength to the bodies, the Rugbywomen series reveals on the contrary all “the strength of the commitment of young people players” in training on the pitch at the Nelson-Mandela stadium.
“The strength they deploy on the ground”
The schoolgirls themselves are surprised when they discover the images. They realize “the power” of their bodies, “the force that they deploy on the ground”, going once morest the assignments of public space. “The photo allowed me to confront my gaze and the people in the survey with the representations of the bodies of young women in the city,” explains Camilo León Quijano, for whom “the photographer’s posture nourishes ethnographic reflection.” The work did not in fact stop there. Large prints, measuring three meters by four, were stuck to the walls of the Chantereine college to also question the view of the Sarcellois and leave room for another story, for an otherness.
With photography, Camilo León Quijano also campaigns for “a public anthropology that goes beyond the scope of research and teaching”. “We need to think regarding forms of material sharing of what we do to advance the scientific debate,” he assumes. We have gone through the observational, the phenomenological, the participatory… There is a lack of sharing this knowledge with a large audience from a non-academic world.”
“A good photo is not a beautiful photo”
His beautiful book published by ÉHESS, the City: a photographic anthropology, the publications in the press and the exhibitions that followed show another language regarding the suburbs. “In social sciences, a good photo is not a beautiful photo with perfect white balance, an iconic composition,” he believes. It’s a photo that questions and amplifies the look at a situation, a body, a space.” In Marseille, he is now investigating how the temperature feels in the city. This time, he will be the ethnologist with the camera among the inhabitants of Belsunce.
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#Photos #question #situation #body #space #Libération
