[Winter 2020]
By Claudia Polledri
[Excerpt]
What is a crowd, and how can a photograph teach us about this protagonist of twentieth-century history? In her photobook Foules, Mélissa Pilon underlines the visual complexity of crowds as living organisms, casting an original gaze upon them. In this work, defined as photojournalism, Pilon aims to offer a new approach to the photojournalistic image, as she has arranged more than 130 black-and-white pictures into diptychs. It is an ambitious project – Pilon does not exclude a sequel – bringing together a collection of images from books, magazines, and photographic archives. The timeframe covered is very broad, from 1896 to 2016. Although the list of photographic credits on the back cover contains dates corresponding to the major events of the last century, the photographs are not organized following a chronological sequence. Geographically, there is a wide diversity of countries (almost thirty), and the images were produced by both well-known and unknown photographers. Finally, the total absence of legends describing the context or nature of the event connected to the images – in other words, the reason for these pairings – confirms that any reading of these pictures as illustrations of a historical fact or the present time is here definitively ruled out…
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