FEATURE
A WAY OF SEEING
All images © Pierrot Men
Pierrot Men casts a loving gaze on his homeland, capturing snapshots of the Malagasy people and their relationship with their surroundings. Donatella Montrone reports.
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very encounter tells a story and every scene is rich with meaning, says Pierrot Men, a Malagasy photographer who’s been documenting everyday life on the African island for more than 40 years. His role is that of witness to his homeland and the kinfolk who shape its culture. He casts a thoughtful eye on his subjects, transforming the banal – women washing linens in a lagoon, a child writing on a chalk board, a man at the barber – into the poetic. To the viewer, everyday scenes familiar to locals become intimate portraits of an island nation whose habitat is as distinct as its inhabitants. Madagascar’s undulating coast, its canyons, dunes and mangroves, along with its incomparable biodiversity and multicultural influences, set an evocative backdrop for Men’s vignettes, snapshots of the Malagasy people and their surroundings. He brings to life small
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moments with an artistic eye, capturing details that might otherwise go unseen, imprinting every frame with elegance. His attention to detail and composition draw the viewer in, making it impossible to look away. ‘Everything in Madagascar inspires me,’ he says. ‘I try to make visible the small fragments of life from ordinary things; not the truth, but the essence of things.’
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en has no set approach to his photography and eschews any suggestion that he’s a chronicler. ‘I don’t make well-constructed reportage – other photographers can do that better than me,’ he says. ‘Each of my photographs is an encounter, each image the visceral expression of what I see. I try to find, and reveal, tiny fragments of life, of time… In short, I make images, just images, because to reflect an image is to run the risk of seeing it disappear.’
He was born Chan Hong Men Pierrot in Midongy du Sud in south-east Madagascar. The son of a French-Malagasy mother and a Chinese father, his career as an artist dates back to his teens, when he took up painting before dedicating his life to photography. ‘My first love was painting,’ he explains. ‘I started in 1972, mainly oils on canvas, copying scenes from the photos I had taken with an old Leica.’ But his talent for imagemaking soon shone, and he abandoned any notion of making a livelihood as a painter, dedicating his life to photography instead. He opened a photo studio, Labo Men, in a poor neighbourhood in Fianarantsoa, the capital of the Haute Matsiatra region in south-central Madagascar. ‘I initially made family portraits and ID photos, and I used to photograph weddings, birthdays, football matches and Famadihanas [the funerary rituals of the Malagasy people]. I did this to make a living, while at the same time mastering the camera.’
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