A road under a bluish blizzard, a close-up of a phone box, a gas pump, and a motel sign illuminated with a red light, like the bloody trace of a wheel in the snow… like the fingers of a hand also shot in close-up… Red, like the skai of an empty car seat, also shot in close-up, or the files that a man with a lost look is clutching… Proceeding by leitmotiv, echoes and repetitions, Kourtney Roy’s photography is intrinsically obsessive because it is aesthetically obsessive. Obsessive through the motifs (deserted roads, signs, skies, nights, fog, snow…), the colors (where blood red and pool blue predominate), and the framing (essentially in close-up or extra-wide shots).
If her self-portraits serve a fantasy bordering on the zany, in her series The Other End of the Rainbow, they serves suspense. And, if not pathos (virtuously avoided by a very masterful use of the unspoken, of the hidden), at least fright and empathy for the victims to whom tribute is paid here. A sort of tragic outcome of the fictional worlds created by the Canadian photographer (born in 1981) over the years, the subject of this series is indeed dramatic: for more than forty years, along Highway 16, a road in northern British Columbia (Canada’s westernmost province), women and girls, most of them from the First Nations (Canada’s indigenous peoples), have been disappearing. It is on this 720km-long stretch of road, called The Highway of Tears, that Kourtney Roy turned her lens between 2017 and 2019, to take pictures of the places linked to the tragedies.
“How do you make sense of an insignificant place?” she asked herself. “The banality of the places I photographed suggests the presence of sinister events as much as it hides it.” In search of the genius loci, the “genius of the place,” “which gives meaning to a particular place,” the photographer has managed to make the strange feeling of a presence permeating this Road of Tears almost palpable from one end to the other.
A long-term work, on the crossroads of artistic and documentary photography, this “storytelling through images of a news item” takes on the appearance of a narrative puzzle in the Galerie des Filles du Calvaire, which presents extracts accompanied by testimonies collected during the artist’s travels. A book published by André Frère presents it in its entirety.
Stéphanie Dulout
Until 25 January
Galerie Les Filles du Calvaire
17, rue des Filles du Calvaire, Paris III