Marguerite Bornhauser, RED HARVEST, 2019

Borrowing its title from the book of Dashiell Hammett, pioneer American detective novelist, Red Harvest by Marguerite Bornhauser is an extension of the work initiated and presented at the MEP, Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris.

« In Dashiell Hammett’s novel the coloured details could be considered as purely incidental, atmospheric asides in the pursuit of a greater immersive fiction. But in Red Harvest the sunshot bodies, too-bright waters, burning skies and broken shadows do something quite different.

Rather than proposing a false reality in which we can lose ourselves, they take us away from life as it is lived, or at least, as we ordinarily experience it on the surface, leading us deep into an ever-present, super-saturated alternate truth.

The colours here are never purely or merely symbolic, signifying anything specific or narrowly defined. Instead, colour itself signifies, in its presence and appearance, variety and intensity, organization and disposition, that here we are in an original world, and seeing it differently. »

From Simon Baker’s text.