ALAN GIGNOUX and CHLOE JUNO Monuments

Description

ALAN GIGNOUX and CHLOE JUNO Monuments

ALAN GIGNOUX and CHLOE JUNO Monuments is a self-published, wire-bound photobook that documents and commemorates communities in North-Rhine Westphalia earmarked for demolition.

Coal Mining

Opencast coal mining has led to the destruction of hundreds of German villages over the last century. Although Germany has promised to phase out coal by 2038, extraction continues and the future of several villages hangs in the balance. Combining Alan Gignoux’s photographs of abandoned houses and Chloe Juno’s images of the personal belongings left behind by departing families, Monuments documents and commemorates communities in North-Rhine Westphalia earmarked for demolition.

The two photographers take different approaches to highlighting the erasure of shared history and collective memory. Gignoux’s images document the destruction of houses, gardens, schools, shops, churches, businesses, roads, the infrastructure of entire communities, while Juno’s photographs show us personal objects that recall individual lives.

Designed by Chloe Juno and Emily Macaulay, the spiral-bound book features Gignoux’s landscape photographs presented as generous spreads with Juno’s objects photographs overlaid as inserts of varying sizes. The book includes archival material, including a found German household goods catalogue and Google images showing the creeping expansion of the surface mines.

Monuments comes with two stickers printed with slogans protesting against the mines and a Christmas card with an image of a Christmas stocking taken by Juno as she was walking around the condemned village of Keyenburg.

Limited edition of 150.

Alan Gignoux

Alan Gignoux is an award-winning documentary photographer and founder of Gignoux Photos, which produces documentary photography and film projects focussing on socio-political and environmental issues around the world.

Gignoux is committed to exposing the effects of displacement on communities around the world. His most exhibited body of work, Homeland Lost, juxtaposes portraits of Palestinian refugees with their former homes in Israel. He has been a regular visitor to the Saharawi refugee camps in Algeria, building relationships and recording camp life since 2005. For his current project, “You can see me, but I don’t exist,” he uses a camera obscura to document asylum seekers living in limbo in European cities.

Chloe Juno

Chloe Juno is a Creative consultant, Visual Artist, Curator, and Co-Lead Documenting Britain, project manager, producer, photographer, and photo editor with a real love of photography and life stories. Primary focus documentary photography with 15 years experience as a photo editor and project manager editing award-winning photography. Current long-term photo project ‘Someones Rubbish’ 5 years of daily photos looking at life now via the objects people discard.

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