John Batho III

My third and final post on the photography of French photographer John Batho, these images from the series Présents et absents' 1998, are very different from the previous posts with their exuberant colour.

"I am so interested in the loss of identity, fading to oblivion, the disappearance (...). Curiously this work brings back my childhood marked by the absence of my father, a prisoner of war for four years. In front of the photograph of my father, a great framed and mounted on the wall of the chamber portrait that my mother made ​​me salute every night, I was a stranger. On his return my father appeared to me entirely different: it did not look like his portrait. In Vilnius, I photographed people as coming from memory to evoke the absence, loss, identity failed." John Batho