01/02/25 - 18/05/25
dans la salle
Portraits retrouvés. Jean-Marc Wull
This is the story of a box of negatives discovered in 2000 in a public dump, somewhere in Latin America, in the course of a three-year journey undertaken by photographer Jean-Marc Wull and his wife in a van.
A box of negatives found, taken and then forgotten again, for fifteen years, before the photographer remembered it and decided to question it.
First of all, amid so many memories, he had to remember in which country this wasteland was located, question the negatives to determine their origin, that of the photographer to whom Jean-Marc Wull wanted to pay tribute.
Among the hundreds of ID photographs, with their anonymous black-and-white faces, one portrait gave him a decisive clue: it was of a firefighter whose name and country, Guatemala, could be read from the insignia on his uniform.
That was all it took for Jean-Marc Wull to decide to go back and continue his research, accompanied by Florent de la Tullaye, a documentary film-maker friend who, like him, is fascinated by these portraits rescued from oblivion. The two explorers had no option but to visit the Guatemalan fire stations, hoping to identify the man who was then their only hope of finding the photographer. Fortune smiled on the two friends: Carlos E. Leon lived in Chiquimulilla, in the department of Santa Rosa, in the south of the country, on the border with El Salvador. He told them that Arthuro Gaëtan, who had been dead for more than thirty years, was the village photographer. Fifty years after their visit to the studio, Jean-Marc Wull used his Rolleiflex to recognize and photograph those who were still alive. In this way, he continued his investigation with an unexpected outcome, documenting the life of this small South American community, a continent whose people and landscapes have never ceased to fascinate him.
Jean-Marc Wullschleger (b. 1979), known as Jean-Marc Wull, is a French photographer who lives and works in Brussels. A graduate of the Société française de photographie (SFP), he worked as an assistant to architectural and fashion photographers before making a series of photo reportages in South America and Asia. In 2002 he co-founded Living Agency, which specializes in interior and studio photography. A portraitist, a photographer and a traveller, he does not lay claim to a particular photographic form, but rather a way of photographing that shows a real closeness to and respect for his subjects. With his Rolleiflex, he captures the reflection of a cultural heritage imbued with beauty and warmth. Whether through his portraits of Bolivia’s only black community, his photographs of the Secoya tribes in the Amazon or the Mapuche in Chile, he records the very existence of these communities in order to better understand their reality.
