“I photograph what we pretend to be, in order to discover what we really are”… For more than fifty years, the American Neal Slavin has pursued this ambition: to pay homage to the individual in the crowd, to consecrate him as a creature that is both social and singular. By the 1970s, he became the master of group photography. From this ultra-codified practice (from school to the marriage ritual), he made a game, the unstoppable parable of his country.
It all started in 1972. Then aged 31, Neal Slavin was awarded a grant, the National Endowment for the Arts, which allowed him to launch a project entitled “Group Portraits of American Organizations”. “I plan to make work that expresses the desire to belong to our country and the conflicts generated by this desire, proclaims the young photographer in his note of intent in 1973. To summarize, I want to photograph groups. They embody America. »
Reading the French philosopher and historian Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) gave him the idea. In 1838, in his famous essay Of democracy in America, the latter considered the numerous associations that the young people liked to form as the expression of a new social order, breaking with the rigid hierarchies of old Europe. Or the group as an expression of a democracy in the process of being invented…
Another trigger was the fascination felt by Neal Slavin when he discovered the panoramic portrait of a troop of scouts, taken during a summer camp. “I remember studying their faces, their body language, wondering who the clowns were, the serious children, evokes the old cub scout. They had come together for a moment gone forever. The only thing left was this indelible image. »
You have 64.09% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.
Lifestyle
