By Marc Donnadieu
Conservateur en chef à Photo Elysée, Lausanne
 
Italian by birth, living most of the time in Geneva when he is not on the roads of the world (Congo, Mali, Algeria, Egypt, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Palestine, Serbia, Afghanistan, Cuba, Haiti, United States), member of the famous Magnum Photo agency for nearly twenty years, contract photographer for Newsweek for ten years and tenured staff of the New York Times, Paolo Pellegrin is one of the most exemplary figures in European photojournalism today. But if he covers all the dramas and conflicts of our time, it is above all “so no one can say that we didn’t know”.
 
A former student of the architecture school of the Università la Sapienza in Rome, he frames and constructs his images using strong compositional lines and an expressive and powerful black and white. Yet, very paradoxically, Paolo Pellegrin is not afraid to say: “I am more interested in a photograph that is ‘unfinished’ – an allusive photograph that can trigger a conversation or a dialogue. There are images that are closed, finished, in which there is no way in.” But isn’t this what every literary narrative, every theatrical text, every choreographic writing, every artist’s word is also seeking: to “engage” with the world, to “engage” with its reader, spectator, viewer, listener? In other words, on the one hand, to “take part” there, in their hands or facing their gaze. On the other hand, to be “engage”, between others and oneself, between the world as stage and the need for a representation, between images and/or words and reading and/or seeing in John Berger’s sense? To be a witness, yes; but how? For whom? And why? To produce links, to build bridges, as the photographer stresses: “Using photography to say something that goes beyond the surface, that vibrates, that echoes.” In this way, page after page, even though they could lose accuracy by being taken out of context or place, the photographs that Paolo Pellegrin has very precisely selected for this season of the Grand Théâtre are all the more moving and intense when confronted to these age-old or emerging texts. They even gain in majesty and symbolism, perhaps even in beauty, a word that Paolo Pellegrin doesn’t trust much. Photography, like writing, does not isolate the world, it brings it to us on the stage of our lives. It illuminates the world, brings it to life and tries to make us better understand it. The same has always been true of the theatre. It is up to us today to respond to these injunctions of the world, of reality, of text and image. It is up to us to make an entrance, here and now, on “their” stage.