CV120 - When Documentary Takes a Side — Pierre Dessureault
Ciel variable 120 - Figures of Affirmation (Summer 2022)
Focus (Individual article, digital version)
Michel Saint-Jean, Quand le documentaire se fait revendication | When Documentary Takes a Side
— Pierre Dessureault
A product of the social movement that pervaded photography in Quebec in the early 1980s, Michel Saint-Jean’s approach was highly engaged. For him, “the document became indictment,” writes Pierre Dessureault, who takes a close look at Saint-Jean’s series L’Amérique québécoise. Saint-Jean, who thought that “a good photographer never photographs anything but himself,” abandoned traditional documentary objectivity. He had “a point of view that was his alone,” writes Dessureault. Saint-Jean was involved both with the struggle for “a sovereign and socialist Quebec” and with the Québécois version of pop art, Ti-Pop. In making images remarkable for their defiance of the laws of composition, he “brought to light the poverty of these productions of the popular mind, erecting an imaginary museum of a cultural landscape in which the grotesque competed with poor taste.”
Details
Language : English & French
Digital Version : PDF, 3.2 Mb
Bibliographical Notice
Pierre Dessureault, “Michel St-Jean — When Documentary Takes a Side” in Ciel variable, No. 120, Montreal, 2022, p. 69-77.