Prayer for lovers with broken hands

FIRST PRIZE WINNER - GOMMA GRANT 2024:"The Winner of the 2024 Gomma Photography Grant has crafted a hauntingly evocative portrait of small-town America, a deeply immersive exploration of Wilson, North Carolina. In this series, the artist masterfully navigates the space between documentary realism and personal interpretation, creating a hybrid narrative where reality is reimagined through a cinematic lens. Drawing inspiration from the unsettling atmospheres of David Lynch, the graphic sensibilities of Daniel Clowes, and the raw existentialism of Charles Bukowski, the work presents a world on the precipice of an unspoken tragedy. The streets of Wilson unfold as a tableau vivant of quiet desolation—abandoned buildings, enigmatic faces, and latent stories of resilience and regret. Here, emptiness does not equate to silence but rather reverberates with the weight of history, social fracture, and an ever-looming sense of uncertainty. "The artist’s gaze extends beyond aesthetics, touching on the structural neglect and economic decline that have reshaped the region, particularly in the wake of deindustrialization. In a state crucial to the American political landscape, the work serves as both a poetic meditation and a socio-political reflection, amplifying voices often left unheard. This series is a striking balance of visual storytelling and social commentary, where the power of the image transcends mere documentation to become a deeply personal, yet universally resonant, cinematic experience."Laura Estelle Barmwoldt - Gomma"In February 2023, I set out to explore the town of Wilson, North Carolina, in the United States. I took advantage of this time of immersion to deepen my relationship with time, to play with my imaginary fantasies of small-town America, where emptiness rubs shoulders with the intranquility of facades lulled by enigmatic faces, abandoned buildings, sin- gular stories and latent repentance. Attempting to convey the imminence of an inescapable tragedy, drawing on the un- conscious universe of authors such as David Lynch, Daniel Clowes and Charles Bukows- ki in this relationship with the «left behind» people... It’s a question of constructing a pictorial narrative with an American accent, while retai- ning the idea of projecting my own sensory and emotional experience of the contrasting tableau vivant of this referenced American territory. I wanted to strike a visual balance between the imposing reality of America, with its faults, fractures, contradictions and history, and my own scripted narrative. The photographic work oscillates between a post-documentary approach and subjective writing, where the importance of immersion is essential to construct a hybrid narrative space where a fictional retranscription of reality confronts a socially and popularly powerful physical base.« Le Chau Cuong