Gomma Photography Grant 2025
The Identity of Scars
Photographer
Guillaume Holzer
The Identity of Scars
15 Feb, 2026
« “Does the perception of what I’ve experienced construct my reality? Construct who I am?”I traveled twice to the Mentawai jungle to live among the Flower Men. The first time offered me a new way of seeing. The second time shattered it.It ended in blood. The shaman with whom I was staying killed two others. I was pulled away in the dark. Yet every photograph in this series was taken before it happened. And still, when I look at them now, it feels as though the violence was already present—latent, suspended in the air. The lens did not simply record forms; it captured a tremor.They call it the observer effect: what you watch changes, and the act of watching changes you. Like in Young’s double-slit experiment, light behaves differently when it is observed. Reality bends beneath the gaze. Memory does too.These images are truthful, but they are not documentary. They are memory—fractured, reconstructed, perhaps even mythologized. What matters is not only what I saw, but how it altered me. Reality is not fixed. It flickers. It slips through your fingers.” »
About the photographer
Guillaume Holzer
« I am a French visual artist and photographer. My path has been shaped by an unusual combination of studies in economics, humanitarian work, and several years of immersion among the maritime nomads of the Komodo archipelago in Indonesia. This experience profoundly transformed my perspective on marginalized ways of life, shifting territories, and the fragile relationship between memory, space, and power.My practice spans photography, installation, and sculpture. I work with time and matter—cement, sand, stone—set in tension with the printed image. This material and sensory approach allows me to question the notion of trace: what humans leave behind, what they erase, and what endures despite them.My photography engages in dialogue with disciplines such as geography, anthropology, and architecture. I explore forms of habitation—physical, symbolic, and mental—focusing on the natural, social, and political structures that shape our perception of territory.Ultimately, my work examines the forms of authority inscribed in landscapes and bodies, seeking new ways to think about cohabitation, circulation, and memory. Influenced by ideas of navigation, networks, and stratification, I conceive each project as a cartography in tension, suspended between rootedness and displacement.I live and work in France. »
