Pascal Colrat

Fox soup

The starting point for these photos was an event related to my family history: my maternal grandfather was assassinated on 14 August 1935, in the South of France. The circumstances and reasons for this murder are still unknown. I decided to carry out an investigation, beginning with a search for newspaper reports from that time and eyewitness accounts from neighbours or members of our family. With this goal in mind I travelled to Aveyron, the French department where my grandfather lived for long periods on several different occasions. Each time I discovered a fact that could explain this tragedy, I created a mise en scène and photographed it. I used significant technical resources for each staging and compelled members of my family to participate in several of them — uncles, aunts, father, mother and sisters. Soon I understood the need for a recurring allegorical character, as a symbol of survival at the very heart of the drama. I started working with Bérengère Desmettre. This model has posed for many international photographers, including Bettina Rheims and Jean-Baptiste Mondino.

The photographs consecutively follow the course of the investigation. Most of the photographs are accompanied by my story of how the series was devised. The tale of this creation has a dual function: to show the public that these photographs were taken without any computer manipulation, and to present the preparatory work done for each shot. What’s more, the majority of objects were actually contrived by hand, soldered, sawn, assembled or nailed together, and the earth was tilled and dug up, since the relation between body and material is also a determining factor of this series. ‘Fox Soup’ is therefore an investigation of an event in the family, and simultaneously a work about the ‘work’.

Above and beyond my personal story, these photographs are meant to be polysemantic, with multiple approaches: every spectator can create his own scenario from them. Moreover, the cinematographic dimension of this series acts like a freeze-frame process in a longer, more extensive and more universal story.