JPM
France, July 2022–Present
JPM is a posthumous collaboration with my father, Jean-Pierre Muller, who unexpectedly passed away on February 20, 2022, at age 68, in Toulouse, France.
I sublimate my father’s life, from war-torn Algiers to the Agence France Presse HQ in Paris.
Facts don’t interest me. I am not trying to make sense of his archive. Instead, I impose my voice and order over it, entering into a visual dialogue with a man whose complex identity will forever remain mysterious. It is a gesture of love and an attempt to help, mostly myself, for it is up to me now to live with the broken legacy he handed me.
When I reentered his house in July 2022, it resembled a landfill. His archive was no different. I worked like an editor would, unafraid to make radical choices. By trimming it down, the archive attained a life of its own. Relationships started to form between bodies of work. They were free, fluid, and radiant.
All the pictures I cataloged, scanned, made, and incorporated are asymptotic. Conclusions will remain latent. Perhaps, light truly is the best disinfectant.
This project is developed in the context of the 2024 Penumbra Foundation Long Term Program Photobooks, and will culminate in a book dummy in December 2024.
France, July 2022–Present
JPM is a posthumous collaboration with my father, Jean-Pierre Muller, who unexpectedly passed away on February 20, 2022, at age 68, in Toulouse, France.
I sublimate my father’s life, from war-torn Algiers to the Agence France Presse HQ in Paris.
Facts don’t interest me. I am not trying to make sense of his archive. Instead, I impose my voice and order over it, entering into a visual dialogue with a man whose complex identity will forever remain mysterious. It is a gesture of love and an attempt to help, mostly myself, for it is up to me now to live with the broken legacy he handed me.
When I reentered his house in July 2022, it resembled a landfill. His archive was no different. I worked like an editor would, unafraid to make radical choices. By trimming it down, the archive attained a life of its own. Relationships started to form between bodies of work. They were free, fluid, and radiant.
All the pictures I cataloged, scanned, made, and incorporated are asymptotic. Conclusions will remain latent. Perhaps, light truly is the best disinfectant.
This project is developed in the context of the 2024 Penumbra Foundation Long Term Program Photobooks, and will culminate in a book dummy in December 2024.
