The Brooklyn Rail

A dapper man in a bell-bottomed suit clasps a pair of sunglasses, resting a moccasin upon a stepstool. A teenager stands uncomfortably straight, his fists clenched, a photo of a woman prominently displayed over his breast pocket. Each outfit and each pose is a decision, a discrete symbol. The men in these pictures have recently immigrated to France, and now they pose for portraits which will mark their first formal representation in their new home. Each image pairs a countenance and an aspiration, an individual and their ambition.

“These photos,” explains Grégoire Keussayan in an interview within Ne m’oublie pas (Don’t Forget Me), “they’re messages. ‘You see, I’m at a desk, because I know how to write.’ […] ‘I have a suitcase to say that I’ll come back soon; the suit, the sunglasses, or the radio to say that I’ve made it; the foot on the stool to show that I’m at ease.’” Keussayan is the gruff Marseillaise who inherited the keys to Studio Rex, a photography studio in the city’s Belsunce district which his father opened in the 1960s. Until its closure in 2018, Studio Rex retained more than ten thousand portraits and negatives, the plurality of which were produced for government identity documents. The entirety of these archives were acquired by the publisher, artist, and archivist Jean-Marie Donat, whose personal collection of photographs comprises nearly 40,000 images of primarily amateur and anonymous origin. Donat has selected roughly a thousand of the Studio’s portraits for Ne m’oublie pas, an ambitious new photobook which accompanies a highly regarded show at Les rencontres d’Arles last summer.

Divided into three sections and accompanied by essays and an interview with Keussayan (all in French with English translation by the reviewer for this review), Ne m’oublie pas showcases Donat’s mammoth curatorial project. From the Studio’s archival troves, Donat assembled hundreds of monochrome faces in mesmerically similar expressions. In his book’s later pages, he collects dozens of more glamorous studio portraits which, he writes, were “meant to be sent back home testifying to the attainability of success in the host country.”

The casual poses in these portraits belie real fear and apprehension. France in the 1980s was marked by the ascendance of the National Front, numerous episodes of horrific racial violence, and the rise of nativist movements which demonized immigrants and nonwhite French. In this era of “La France aux français,” Keussayan’s father—a refugee from the Armenian genocide—was trusted by virtue of his own outsider status. Customers, Keussayan says, hoped an Armenian might treat them without the prejudice of the native French. Studio Rex became a haven of sorts, producing portraits for thousands of immigrant men and women—but mostly men—who arrived wearing fresh haircuts, clean mustaches, and their finest clothes. They posed against a cyclorama wall, and, as the flash fired, made real their new lives in France.

The images in Ne m’oublie pas appear without names, dates, or identifying information of any kind. This anonymity is striking: though the book’s portraits depict their subjects at pivotal moments in their lives, every detail has faded into history. There is a daunting quality to Ne m’oublie pas, for so many anonymous images can inundate and overstimulate the viewer. By reflex, details and distinctions fade, mustaches begin to match, and all those beige suits start to look the same. There’s a risk of a gradual effacing, one in which the uniqueness of each subject dissipates, and the individuals who immigrate blur into one vast immigration. Ne m’oublie pas challenges this erasure, beginning with that imperative title: don’t forget me. Donat implores his audience to consider the faces on every page, and to comprehend a mass migration by the individuals who comprise it.

This is a lesson which resonates much nearer than Marseille. Over the last eighteen months, more than 140,000 migrants have arrived in New York City. These migrants have faced skepticism and even outright disdain from many locals and elected officials, and their very existence has become a political cudgel for the American right. Their vast and courageous immigration is framed as a “crisis,” which, the mayor warns, will “destroy the city.”

It’s in this context that a book like Ne m’oublie pas matters most. Donat endeavors to preserve the individual humanity in a collective event. His book is a triumph of curation, but it's also a record of history's rhyme. It reminds us of another era in which faces blurred together, of another migration of vast and almost unknowable scale. Then, as now, we might follow a simple lesson: look every face in the eye, and heed that plea—don’t forget me.