Larchipel by Patrick Mourral
Galerie Frédéric Moisan
72 rue mazarine 75006 paris
30 Oct – 29 Nov 2008
In rue Mazarine we came to ‘L’Archipel‘, a show of black and white and colour work by Patrick Mourral (b1976, Scotland), one of many shows in Paris that wasn’t a part of any festival. Previously shown in Strasbourg, it closed on 29 November, but I’m sure will be seen again elsewhere.
You can see a rather fast-moving and fast talking (in French) video about him and his work photographing modern-day nomads, new age travellers in Europe (we used to call them hippies.) It gets easier to understand when he talks about his work, and this téléAlsace feature does show quite a few of his pictures.
Archipel (archipelago) is the traveller’s metaphor for the level of the world they inhabit, straddling various countries along the roads to festivals, isolated areas in forests where they camp around their vans etc. They make only limited contact with the nation states over which they wander, seldom staying long in a place, sometimes doing short-term jobs or trading, usually on a cash basis.
Its a movement that got moving with the hippies in England in the ’80s and there are now thought to be more than 10,000 of them in Europe. Many, particularly in the earlier days were rat-race refugees from the middle classes who chose to live a freer if more spartan way of life, but in latter years many poor working-class inner city kids have decided that poverty and freedom on the road beats poverty and idleness in the slums.
The website of the galerie frederic moisan whose long white-painted space the show was in has some problems. You can view it in French but I had great problems in seeing things if I clicked on the ‘english‘ link, and even more if I attempted to access the English pages directly.
Mourral’s is serious work, a result of 10 years spent following and staying with the travellers, getting to know them and to be trusted by them. He presents a sympathetic but honest picture of them which is rather different from the sensationalist rubbish that often hits the press in the silly season (is that the whole year now?)
While the black and white prints on show were very impressive, Mourral’s colour work on display was ruined by over-saturated, garish colour, making it impossible for me to take seriously. This is a shame, as the images on the web, if still at times rather hyperreal, seem considerably more interesting than those in the gallery (although many are the same pictures.)
Colour ink jet is capable of producing more subtle and accurate prints (especially from digital files) than we have ever before enjoyed in photography. But it can also produce the kind of crude poster quality that does nothing for sensitive photography.