Welcome to the new Gignoux Photos website! During the lockdown period the team – Alan, Chloe, Jenny and Emily – took the opportunity to review Alan’s considerable archive of photos taken around the world over the past 20 years. From his early days as a stringer in South Africa, to his newest project which has taken him to refugee camps closer to home in continental Europe, Alan has been witness not so much to the headline events of recent history as the legacy of those events – how lives are lived when the spotlight moves somewhere else. He has followed different issues over many years, such as the Oil Sands in Alberta, Canada, and the displacement of the Saharawi people of Western Sahara.
We have spent the last months cataloguing and editing Alan’s archive in preparation for the creation of a selection of photobooks and zines. First to be published will be a photobook based on Alan’s work from his residency with the NCCA in the Russian Urals in 2009. This will be followed by a hand-made book of images from Alan’s work documenting the environmental damage resulting from mountaintop removal mining in Appalachia, West Virginia.
There are two further books planned for later in the year or early next year: a photobook based on Alan’ portrait and landscape pairs from his internationally exhibited project, Homeland Lost: The Palestinians, and a zine centred on his long-term documentation of another group of displaced people, the Saharawi.
At the end of 2020 the Gignoux Photos team published the first two in a planned collectible series of small A5 zines, a format selected to showcase smaller bodies of work taken over a few weeks or even a day.
The zines are hand-stitched with coloured thread and include a postcard on the front and back. The postcards offer a real-world opportunity to share one of Alan’s images by tearing it off on the perforated side and sending it by post, perhaps with a hand-written message. The physical activity of sharing a printed image is a process with several steps, which suggest an alternative, possibly more reflective and more intimate experience, than that associated with digital sharing.
The postcards can be removed without disturbing the integrity of the main body of the zine.
Vancouver Pride features photos from the Vancouver Pride parade in 2014 and supports the event organizers’ mission to celebrate the LGBTQAI2S+ community and their right to be their full selves. Available to buy in the shop
Canadian Rangers features photos taken in 2008 documenting Inuit part-time Canadian military reservists in training and on patrol in Nunavut, the northernmost province of Canada. Available to buy in the shop
The collectibles will initially be printed in an edition of 100 each and are printed on FSC uncoated 120gsm paper.
The zines were conceived and produced by the team at Gignoux Photos: Alan Gignoux, photographer; Chloe Juno, creative consultant; Emily Macaulay, Stanley James press, designer; and Jenny Christensson, editor.
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