Christophe Gin

3rd July – 6th November 2016

The Fondation Carmignac launched the Carmignac photojournalism Award in 2009 with the aim of supporting and celebrating photojournalism. This unique award funds a photographer to visit areas of the world at the centre of geostrategic conflicts, where human rights and freedom of speech are often violated.
For its 6th edition, the photographer Christophe Gin was awarded the prestigious grant for his report into France’s lawless areas, specifically Guyana. This work is exhibited today in the main room of the Montfaucon Hotel.
This exhibition is the fruit of a unique partnership with the Collection Lambert. It precedes the Fondation Carmignac’s opening of a museum dedicated to contemporary art in summer 2017, at the chosen location of the Island of Porquerolles (Var).

Christophe Gin, a French photographer born in 1965, offers his viewer a complete immersion into the heart of a territory that usually remains outside the media spotlight – Guyana. He has been exploring Guyana since 2001, and reveals to us the complex human, legal, political and socio-economic issues at its centre, far from the regulations and norms of the metropolis.

Christophe Gin’s photographs depict a territory that has evolved from the original ‘Eldorado’ fantasy attached to it. Gin shows us a multicultural society that is as diverse as it is fragmented and unbalanced, faced with poverty and violence, and where each isolated area is ruled by its own codes and laws.

Gin’s singular, almost pictorial black and white photography gives a certain distance to his images, allowing us to view Gin’s subjects from a perspective free from popular misconceptions. From the luxurious and seemingly infinite jungle of the Guyanese landscape, Gin’s subjects thus appear to us like representatives of a distant world, far from the realities of mainland France.