Asian Portraits. Pierre Gonnord.

Pierre Gonnord's Asian portraits were virtually unknown until Casa Asia He brought them together for an exhibition (2006) and published this monograph on that occasion. This volume comprises images by this French photographer based in Spain, internationally recognized for his approach to photography “starting from the purity of an unadorned language.” From the beginning, Gonnord has been drawn to the power of expression that can be detected in the faces of certain subjects, often socially excluded and marginalized, whose existence is stored in the model's gaze captured by the photographer, who in turn allows us to rediscover ourselves by glimpsing the truth of being. In Pierre Gonnord's Asian portraits, one can perceive with a certain accuracy the power of what Barthes calls point and compares it with an arrow that “comes to pierce him,” when he is in front of a certain photograph. The gravity of the images that are reproduced, derived from the models of these already absent portraits, intensifies the tension between their imaginary life and the death that invokes their absence, what they have been or what they were and will not be again.

For more information, contact email ppgad@pucrs.br.