Bouquinistes de Paris

As a child, there were the serious, sometimes painful faces of adults who fell silent when she entered the room, followed over the years by fragments of sentences. Names and places etched themselves into memory even before she knew to whom or what they referred. In this photographic quest carried out between 2018 and 2020, the guiding thread is the name of these places marked by History: Munich, Dachau, Prora, Nuremberg, Prague, Terezin, the Wolf’s Lair… Starting from a black-and-white print that she enhances with oil paint, the author intensifies the blurring of boundaries between past and present, the confusion between dream and reality, to merge personal memory with historical memory. A sociologist and independent photographer, Irène Jonas has been a member of the Révélateur Agency since 2016. In 2018, she was awarded the FotoMasterclass First Prize.