Murder

The genesis of Guillaume Simoneau's new book, Murder, is in the spring 1982. Around the same time Masahisa Fukase produced his masterpiece post-war Karasu (Ravens), Simoneau's family adopted a nest full of baby crows orphaned by a fallen tree. The photographs in this period, taken by Simoneau's mother, paint an unusual and lyrical vision of childhood. Nearly forty years later, these moments are commemorated in dialogue with Simoneau's new works, produced in spring 2016 and 2017 in Kanazawa, Japan. This setting, Karasu's birthplace, punctuates the book with a heightened interest in tradition and timelessness that goes beyond the framework of these events for the landscape, the famous thatched roof houses, pine forests and the coastline. The clear architectural qualities of the new photographs evoke a rendering of Fukase's original which is however distinct from its time. In Murder, the original black and white image of the child photographer, crows perched on his shoulders, rubs shoulders with visions of violence: a crow suspended by a rope, tangled and rotting, another pinned by a large bird of prey. The mood of this contrast is never cynical: on the contrary, he develops an ambivalent approach to nostalgia, energetic and cathartic. Many of these photographs directly reference to Karasu, and it is this language of violence inherited from Fukase which becomes the way in which Simoneau contests this heritage. Throughout the book, the The symbolism of the raven is constantly at play. In childhood images, the raven becomes an unlikely symbol of intimacy; coupled with blurry glimpses of the bird in flight, Simoneau threatens to give back to the bird its cultural function of omen of turbulent times.