Edition 2022
as part of the Louis Roederer Discovery Award
PRESENTED BY
SPACE STUDIO, BARODA, INDIA
DEBMALYA ROY CHOUDHURI
A FACTLESS AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Since he was a teenager, Debmalya Roy Choudhuri has been using photography as others use “I” in a diary. In 2018, the suicide of his partner in India marked a turning point in his career. Originally from this country, where heterosexuality is the norm, and based in the United States, dominated by whiteness, photography became for him a back-andforth between self and other. Mixing snapshot and staged photography, portrait and self-portrait, black & white and color, the artist builds an intimate, melancholic œuvre. A factless autobiography — in reference to the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa—presents three profiles made of a multitude of portraits, like so many fragile lives in Donald Trump’s America. Through a collaborative choreography in which the authentic is sometimes colored with dream, the photographer raises here the question of self-affirmation.
Exhibition curator: Taous Dahmani.