Pierregonnord

The faces of the people in the portraits of Pierre Gonnord stare back at the viewer from the inky darkness of their black backdrops with all of the intensity of those painted by Francisco de Goya, Diego Rodriguez de Silva y Vélazquez, Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, or Francisco de Zurbarán. Gonnord is unique in contemporary Spanish photography for his intense concentration on the faces of his sitters. He has consistently focused on photographing marginalized people, most recently street people around Madrid where he has lived since 1988 and the Roma and Sinti people living in Andalusia.
Gonnord is the modern heir of an emphasis on the portrait that dominated Spanish photography especially in Madrid and Sevilla in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and a form of Baroque art that flourished with the courts sponsoring portraiture and religiously themed works.
The people in Gonnord’s portraits share something of the intensity of the saints featured in the paintings with their air of torment and, perhaps, madness. Gonnord’s people, many of whom have lived on the streets, bear on their faces the stigmata of a life on the edge. Yet Gonnord is able to let his subjects keep their personal identity and quiet dignity.
Identity and dignity are at the heart of Gonnord’s work although he selects his subjects based on something about their persona yet without knowing them. He writes, “I choose my contemporaries in the anonymity of the big cities because their faces, under the skin, narrate unique, remarkable stories about our era. Sometimes hostile, almost always fragile, and very often wounded behind the opacity of their masks, they represent specific social realities and, sometimes, another concept of beauty.” Gonnord is trying, as he puts it, “to get under the skin.” He is aiming not merely to depict the faces he sees, but also to “to approach the unclassifiable, timeless individual, to suggest things that have been repeated over and over since time began.”
Portrait photography is also inevitably marked by sociology. Like the attempt by August Sander to record a collective portrait of his time, Antlitz der Zeit, Gonnard’s subjects reach out beyond their own to reveal our world as well: “I would like to encourage crossing a border. I search at the meeting points of the urban scene: streets, squares, cafés, stations, universities . . . then further still, at the peripheries, places isolated from the rest of the world and in more marginal settings such as prisons, hospitals, social shelters, rehabilitation centers, monasteries, or circuses. Because our society is there as well.”
That last point is vital to understand Gonnord’s approach and his heartfelt concern for his subjects. The images we create inevitably inform our own autobiographical history. Gonnord is completely aware of this. He writes, “Every day, in the photographic ritual, I am building, little by little, my self-portrait. I thus try to hold back time to write my diary, listening to others breathe and leaving a trace upon the ephemeral. At the same time it is an act of rebellion against oblivion.” For him it is “a vital necessity . . . to give them visibility.”
Gonnord’s subjects are not modern-day saints in the literal sense of the word, but they
could be, and they, like us, are all part of this same world. They must not be ignored.
Far from being sentimental, Gonnord’s use of the symbolism of traditional Spanish
painting elevates his subjects to a kind of everyday sublime.