Since 1983, photographer and writer Patrick Bard has been photographing his nephew. He started without really knowing why, when he was 16 years old. His name was Jean-Pierre. He married early, had two children who grew up and became a road haulier in Sarcelles. When his relationship to gender began to change in the mid-1990s, Patrick Bard continued to take pictures of him, of her, rather.
Jean-Pierre officially became Jeanne in 2001. Jeanne knew men, then she ended up falling in love with a woman in 2008. Initially, the relationship started as clearly lesbian. Two years later, Jeanne decided to become a man again, while retaining her identity as a woman. More than anything, his nephew Jeanne decided that the question of gender was not fixed and that it was not a problem for him.
My Nephew Jeanne is a book where the reader follows the story from the writer's point of view, written in a literary vein: from the awareness of her nephew, to her stubbornness, against and against a social and professional environment, to change her body to become a woman. Unusual, compared to other stories around gender: the return to one's masculine condition after all the struggles to assume a femininity. A book of text interspersed with photographs by Patrick Bard but also photographs from Jean-Pierre/Jeanne's family album allows us to follow, in a certain intimacy, the life of the character.
Available via babelio.com
Post a Comment