How does one begin to excavate memories that lie in the distressed trough of the murder of a loved one? When he was seven years old, Jean-Michel André was staying at a hotel with his father and his father’s new girlfriend in Avignon, France, when a robbery turned into a homicide with both his father and lover were slain in the hotel room next to his. Thirty years later, he began to process the event and started a journey to understand his father’s missing life. He began to imagine where their lives may have taken them, and slowly, the memories  of that event began to be concretized and returned. To understand what happened and what it meant to his life, the artist confronted these memories and traumas and produced a photobook that examines the event.

Stating that he does not have many memories of his father, apart from the event, he began sifting through the objects left behind from watches to Kodachromes and his father’s passport and as I write this, I am truly sorry for his experience, but applaud his ability to sift through the unholy ashes of that event to find communion and peace with his father’s overshadowing death. I cannot imagine the strength of resolve it must have taken as a young man (for we are the same age) to get through a lifetime of disorienting and reeling trauma to find one’s way toward examination and acceptance. Whereas I have never felt that art can instill political change, I do believe that it can help heal on a personal level.

The book entitled Chambre 207 (the room Jean-Michel was in when the murder happened) is a labyrinth of pieces reconstructed and reconstituted, as per curator and writer Clément Chéroux’s assertions in the text. The assertion is that it is not simply a review or reconstruction of the crime with Jean-Michel revisiting locations of trauma, but that the artist is also reconstituting the relationship between himself and his father. It is a double condition of seeking the former to close the door on the crime itself factually, and the other is a way to regain peace with his lost father. It is profoundly touching, and no amount of sympathy from my end will do justice to the bravery that I believe that artist has exhibited in tackling such a profound topic as abrupt and violent loss.  This is an important book for people who have lost someone, especially in a violent manner. It touches on many points of the human character to confront difficult personal moment and to seek out a form of redemption and in doing so, caters to the courageous side of the human spirt.

Throughout the book archival material and pictures from the artist collude and create an atmosphere that dissects the difficulties of memories and trauma in a convincing way. At first, there is the forensic capacity of the archival material, but that is slowly joined by personal objects and photographs that derail the investigative manner of the archival imagery to give the book a deeply personal suggestion. When combined, it feels like an emotional record or dossier. I cannot think of a much braver title in recent years and its effect is significant. It is a book like Jan Rosseel’s Belgian Autumn in which the personal tragedy of loss is successfully funneled into a work of therapy or an approximation of it. Please do pick this up. It is not meant to be a discussion about how great pictures are in a photobook, but rather a way of communicating something fundamentally courageous and difficult.

‘On 4 August 1983 I was on the road with my father, his new partner and his daughter. It was the year I turned seven. We were leaving for Corsica, it was late and our parents decided to stop off in Avignon to spend the night. They booked two rooms at the Sofitel, in the La Balance district, near the Popes’ Palace. The children’s room was 207: that’s where I left my memory and my childhood.

That night, seven people were murdered, including my father and his partner. The case was never fully solved, but the investigation did reveal a motive: an attempted hold-up by ‘small-time’ criminals that degenerated into carnage. The circumstances of the massacre remain unclear.

Sleeping that night with O. in a room adjoining my father’s, I lost my memory in shock. Thirty years later, I began researching, opening many doors and collecting documents. As the truth slipped away, I shifted my gaze and dispersed the horror to ward off the trauma. I revisited and photographed places that I might have visited – or might have visited – with my father. I travelled to Avignon, to the scene of the tragedy, to the Arles region, where one of the accused was found, and to Corsica, his holiday destination in August 1983. I return to Germany, where my father worked for the Foreign Office, and to Senegal, where I spent my early childhood with my parents.

I combine my photographs with investigative material, press archives and family objects to create a collection that questions memory, mourning and reparation. My approach avoids pathos and the spectacular, and questions the limits of the image: what can be shown, how, why, for whom? How can we make abstract notions tangible and share the intimate in order to touch on a form of universality?

The photographic medium is transformed into a repairing instrument, with the work taking shape and becoming the sole driving force. ’

—

Conceived as a visual essay, Chambre 207 is as much about reconstitution as reconstruction. The project transports us into an anachronistic temporality, mixing the future and the past of that night of 5 August 1983, and shows us a quest for truth that, little by little, is transformed into deliverance.

Chambre 207 published by Editions Actes Sud (October 2024).
Nadar Prize 2024.

Project supported by the Centre national des arts plastiques, the Institut pour la photographie and the Centre méditerranéen de la photographie.
Chambre 207 is also accompanied by writings by the author and an afterword by Clément Chéroux.