To the southwest of Ibiza, 3 kilometers offshore, the rock of Es Vedrà attracts all eyes. Since he discovered it, just out of adolescence, while on vacation in the Balearic Islands with a friend’s family, photographer Henry Roy, 61, has constantly thought about this uninhabited islet. “I see it as a totem of my work, the metaphor of a lost island. » A mental, abstract insularity, which represents the part of emotions that the artist seeks to restore in his images. However, it is also autobiographical.
Henry Roy was born in Port-au-Prince (Haiti). He was 3 years old when his family emigrated to France, to the South, then to the Parisian suburbs, to Montreuil, and finally to Paris where he was enrolled at the prestigious Henri IV college. There, he discovered photography thanks to a classmate. He will make it his profession and will travel all over the world, sent to report for various magazines or during personal projects: Senegal, Cameroon, Morocco, Thailand, Tunisia, Democratic Republic of Congo… Always with Haiti in mind.
“It’s a country that never came true. More than two centuries after its independence, it is still in gestation. » The name of the vast exhibition dedicated to him at the Art Gallery of Western Australia, in Perth, accompanied by a book published by Franco-British editions Loose Jointsis also revealing: “Impossible Island” (The Impossible Island).
The approximately 75 images in the book show a sunset, crocodiles surrounding a dry canoe, portraits of young people, the actress Ludivine Sagnier… So many photographs taken from 1983 to 2023, all over the world. And just as many mysteries. “I like images that reserve their secrets, the idea of dreamlike. » He himself says he is influenced by the postcolonial thinker Edouard Glissant and his concept of creolization, or the way in which several cultures that intermingle form a new one.
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