All images © Henri Kisielewski
Zoning in on a small town in Normandy, Non Fiction lends its characters a self-conscious ambiguity
When Henri Kisielewski’s newly completed body of work Non Fiction went on display at Normandy’s Les Franciscaines in 2022, the photographer was eager to gauge visitors’ reactions. Having created the images in a quiet, modest nearby town, he wondered what locals would make of his interpretations of them and their home. As he watched, one young boy made his way around the exhibition, confidently explaining its meaning to his sister: a bearded gentleman was assigned a backstory involving a woman from another portrait, the home they shared self-assuredly pointed out.
Witnessing this interaction, the photographer was equal parts surprised, amused and satisfied. While the subjects of his work are real people with real lives, their portraits offer no hint at what these actualities might be. This young visitor had created his own work of fiction from their faces, and from a landscape located mere miles away.
“On one hand flash is cold and objective, we’ve been programmed to see it as this sort of truth-telling machine. But on the other hand, in a less journalistic context we think because there’s flash it must be fake. It’s like you’re incorporating fiction into the image”
“The work came about because I was getting more interested in photography’s slippery relationship to truth,” Kisielewski explains. “It’s a very small town and there’s not much going on, and because I have this obsession with fact and fiction, I wanted to see if it was possible to be there and to photograph the world as it is, but in a way that makes it feel like fiction.”
As the photographer points out, he is not the first to explore this dichotomy of fact and fiction. He references Thomas Bellinck’s installation Domo de Eŭropa Historio en Ekzilo (The House of European History in Exile) (2013–18), which asks us to place ourselves in the future, visiting a museum exploring the history of a now-defunct European Union. He was also inspired by artist Stanley Brown, who in the 1960s asked passers-by to draw directions to a place, presenting the maps as abstract works.
Kisielewski’s methods may be vastly different but there are echoes of Brown in his approach, his use of vivid flash dampening our ability to understand his images. “On one hand flash is cold and objective, we’ve been programmed to see it as this sort of truth-telling machine,” he explains. “But on the other hand, in a less journalistic context – I’m thinking of Max Pinckers, for instance – we think because there’s flash it must be fake. It’s like you’re incorporating fiction into the image.”
To weave in this intangible sense of fantasy, Kisielewski selects scenes in which we sense action could be imminent, if a missing protagonist returned to the frame. Action is also implied in the conversations between images – a dark lane and an unknown man with tights obscuring his face, an empty brick doorway and a set of identical triplets – from which narratives emerge. “Photography is good at suggesting, but bad at explaining,” he says. “And I guess this project is good at crystallising that – it’s so suggestive, but actually, there’s nothing there.”
Non Fiction is set to be published as a monograph by Le Bec en l’air in autumn. Kisielewski describes the work as an ode to chance encounters and is keen to make more in this vein, though he acknowledges capturing such experiences is not always easy. “I went to see this Tennessee Williams play,” he recalls. “At one point they say, ‘I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.’ I almost fell off my chair. I realised that’s exactly what I’d just spent two months trying to say.”