“I chose the portrait as my subject…”.
For almost thirty years now, the presence of the other in the image, its subtle and mysterious emanation, has been at the heart of Finnish photographer Marjaana Kella’s work. What does it mean to make a portrait? Between 1997 and 2001, she produced portraits of people under hypnosis. Her aim was to explore the discrepancy between inner state and outer appearance. In the same period, she also photographed subjects facing away from the camera. She knows that in traditional portraiture, the face, the eyes and expression are the focus of attention. “The face of the Other calls me to respond”, wrote Emmanuel Levinas. By obliterating this mark of presence in the world, Kella seeks to draw attention to the image itself. What is a photograph? Experimental methods involve changing parameters of the experiment in order to identify how those affect the outcome. This is precisely what Kella does with the process of representation. She questions the way portraits are done, but also the way we look at them.

Curator of the exhibition
Clément Chéroux
Directeur, Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson

In the collective imaginary, High Kabylia, the mountainous region of northern Algeria, is the symbol of a certain kind of resistance to imperialism, colonization, domination
and terror of all ages. It’s as if the ferruginous nature of its soil had forged the steely character of its inhabitants.

Born in Geneva in 1977, Karim Kal, the grandson of Kabyle parents, is not embarking on an autobiographical or personal journey. The project he developed for the Prix HCB is rather rooted in the research he begun two decades ago in places shaped by political power – prisons, hospitals, suburbs –.

Deeply influenced by the abstract painting vocabulary of the second half of the 20^th century, Kal has developed an immediately recognizable style. Mainly photographing
at night, using a powerful flashlight, he reveals certain details and lets others disappear into the darkness. He sculpts reality with light.

Far from the informational overload to which we’ve become accustomed by mainstream media, he slows things down, selects what’s important, and thus proposes a critical
but equally poetic form of asceticism. In so doing, he redefines the documentary contract that is inherent to photographic language.

Curator of the exhibition
Clément Chéroux
Directeur, Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson