Céline Levain – Captives – PhotoBook Journal

Review by Hans Hickerson •

Some photobooks document social, political, and cultural projects photographers undertake in their desire to do something beneficial and worthwhile, and the process and structure involved in such projects can in turn organize and shape the work of the photographer.

French photographer Céline Levain was involved with female prisoners in two prisons in France. She worked for five years leading photography workshops, collaborating with inmates to stage themselves for the camera and empowering them to find and reveal their inner strength and dignity.

The resulting photobook, Captives, is not just a report but also stands on its own as a coherent finished work. It succeeds by virtue of a design that does not overreach and that juxtaposes portraits of women inmates with photographs that represent the outside world of their imagination. You see women, and then, after turning semi-transparent blank pages, you see photos of places they can’t be but that they imagine, better places where they hope to be in the future, serene landscapes with mountains, beaches, forests, a lake at twilight.

The real power of Captives lies in the photos of the 17 inmates pictured. There they are: captured, vulnerable, exposed, real people in all their humanity, present in their fixed photographic there-ness, guilty and innocent just like us. Quiet, reflective, contemplative, inside themselves, self-possessed, most with eyes closed or looking to the side, only two of them engaging the viewer directly, head and shoulder shots in front of a neutral dark background.

Looking at them you wonder who they are, what they are thinking, and what were the circumstances that led to their incarceration. You imagine that prison has changed them. You wonder what will happen to them when they are released. Will they struggle to survive? Will they catch a lucky break? Will they be pulled back into their past patterns and behaviors?

One of the photos of outside places is of a bridge, and the moving text by writer Pauline Delabroy-Allard pictures the women balancing on both sides of it between their two lives, the before and the after, the then and the now, enduring both forever. The seventeen women, she concludes, are “captives, but first of all captivating.”

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Hans Hickerson, Associate Editor of the PhotoBook Journal, is a photographer and photobook artist from Portland, Oregon.

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Céline Levain – Captives

Photographer: Céline Levain (born in 1984 in Charente, France)

Text – dans la sombre forêt de l’existence: Pauline Delabroy-Allard

Language: French

Design: Sur la Crête Editions

Printing and Production: Média Graphic, France

Softbound with illustrated cover; 25 color photographs; open spine lay flat, perfect bound; 64 pages, unpaginated; 21 x 28.5 cm

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