The bodies are beautiful, and they are naked. But facing the light, facing the autumnal nature, facing the monuments that emerge, these bodies laid bare are only a vain counterpoint to the fighting that may have taken place in these places. The bodies are only there to emphasize the gap between beauty and what is hidden. The human nature is perhaps beautiful, it is above all a great fragility.
While we are just leaving commemorations of the Great War, this is an inconvenient work, which shows that the day after the conflict or a hundred years later, the war will always be pregnant ... If we must not forget it is also because it gives an incomparable strength of life, and the artist Julien Sunyé is undoubtedly one of the best placed to say it.
"Every year we celebrate peace, but we are still at war." Through 24 European destinations (in Spain, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium), the photographer Julien Sunyé evokes the
traumas of the conflicts that are crossed, those that are ignored or those that are ignored by denial. Black Holes, the artist in conflict violence, who are opposed or opposed today, in the world: "The emotions that cross us origins in childhood. It takes time, attention and real work on oneself to understand and analyze. But modern life leaves little room for this inner quest. Finally, show your pains, learn to overcome, to make peace with what it is to live and to create a harmonious future for oneself and others ".
A series that evokes universal historical themes, but which can obviously refer to many more personal elements. And Julien Sunyé knows something, he who worked in finance before diving in 2013 in a severe depression whose causes escape him. It prevents him from working, from being able to express his emotions and thus from continuing to live. Seeking to cope, Julien Sunyé is interested in different forms of trauma. He learns that childhood trauma is deeply embedded in the subconscious and can define the present. The person then becomes a prisoner of his past.
During the summer of 2016, the photographer decided to go to the battlefields of Verdun. He is struck by the idea that the past can lock up an individual but also an entire people. Soothed by the photographic work that led his way to several countries in Europe on "sensitive or historical" sites, Julien Sunyé feels that he is in the right place to lead his reflection.
Each new photographic session helps him overcome his depression a little more until he finally manages to recover in September 2018.
Born in Amsterdam in 1982, Julien Sunyé begins street photography in Paris. This Franco-Dutchman (French by his father and Dutch by his mother) found his inspirations as much in the work of Henri Cartier Bresson as in the Dutch painters of the 16th and 17th centuries. At the same time the humanism of the French photographer, and the intimacy of the Dutch painters. Text: A.D
Nicolas Sarazin
