De Laboris. Pierre Gonnord

Through his portraits, photographer Pierre Gonnord immortalizes the image of the individual, alone and anonymous, but belonging to a family, a clan, a group, with well-defined roots rooted in an ancestral culture, respecting the mystery that surrounds them.

INAUGURATION. APRIL 27

The origin of the work De Laboris by Pierre Gonnord (Cholet, 1963) is to be found in the Museum's commission to participate with a project in the series Tender Puentes, based on the Museum's photographic collections. In the Museum's photographic collections, Gonnord discovered the portraits of past photographers, such as Napper or Laurent, but especially Tenison.

Gonnord's gaze focuses on characters upon whom the weight of lineage and tradition falls. These anonymous faces awaken our emotions and become transcendent, timeless and eternal. Gonnord's work in De Laboris is based on the theme of portraiture, which he describes as silent interpellations that narrate in a sober way, through a simple language, unique stories. The photographer takes these figures and gives them back their dignity, capturing them in close-up, full-length or bust-length, looking towards infinity, oblivious to the lens, the photographer or the public that contemplates them and that, with their presence, makes them real and eternal.

His photographs reflect empathy with the problems and life experiences of the people portrayed. To do so , Gonnord gets involved with these individuals and groups, living with them, learning to know them and apprehending their essence, discarding what does not interest him and choosing those who will become the protagonists of his portraits, seeking to retain their charisma.

At The Gypsies of La Raya in which he portrays a racial group that still living in our days symbolize in the collective imaginary a people exiled for centuries, who fight for their survival and preservation in the face of globalization. They are a nomadic group that lives between Spain and Portugal, and gather the mixed heritage of the different races that populated the Iberian Peninsula together with that of the gypsy people.

While in The Minersreflects a world already in decline, of heroes forged in the beginnings of the labor and union movement. Gonnord portrays the miners of the Asturian-Leonese basin, in which together with workers native to the region, and heirs of long dynasties linked to the mine, coexist immigrants from different European mining basins, also heirs of an ancestral tradition, linked to a hard and difficult labor world, but young and vital, mostly composed of men.

PIERRE GONNORD

Pierre Gonnord (born in Cholet, France in 1963) is a French photographer and resident in Madrid since 1988. A self-taught photographer, he has received the Premio de la Cultura de la Comunidad de Madrid, in 2007, and the Premio Internacional de Fotografías de Alcobendas, in 2014. The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid owns several of his photographs.

Gonnord's work focuses primarily on human faces. Examples are his works Interiors (Madrid, 199), City (New York, 2001) and Utopians (2004-2005). They show portrait sequences of very different types, where Gonnord chose to approach characters marginalized by society and photographed them in close-ups of the face: they were homeless, prisoners, mad or blind, but also monks, geishas, members of urban gangs.

He has exhibited in many public and private galleries, such as the Centro Cultural Conde Duque, the Maison Europeénne de la Photographie in Paris, the Museo de Bellas Artes in Seville, the University of Salamanca, the Atelier des Forges, Les Recontres d'Arles, the FRAC Auvergne-Ecuries de Chazerat, Clermont Ferrand, the Helsinki Photo Festival and Oslo.