Gomma Photography Grant 2024
Sous terre
Photographer
Antoine Lecharny
Sous terre
23 Jan, 2025
Gomma Black & White Winner:
"It is with great admiration that we present Antoine Lecharny as the recipient of the prestigious Black and White Award for his extraordinary body of work. Through his unique and evocative monochrome images, Lecharny explores the hidden histories of forgotten spaces, imbuing his photographs with a haunting mood and deeply personal narrative. In his series, he delves into the forgotten remnants beneath the surface—synagogues, graves, and traces of a tragic past that have been obscured by time and erasure.
Lecharny’s images, with their distinct mood and subtle hues, offer a powerful meditation on the passage of time and the silences that follow histories of violence and loss. His work captures the tension between what is visible and what has been lost to memory, as he reflects on the erasure of bodies, names, and histories. Through his lens, Lecharny highlights the contrast between the seemingly peaceful surface of the modern city and the profound scars left by the violence of the past. The landscapes he portrays—snowy streets, brambles, and stone monuments—become quiet witnesses to a history that is too often forgotten.
Lecharny’s ability to render this complex relationship between memory and erasure in such powerful monochrome imagery speaks to his extraordinary skill as a photographer and visual artist. With a unique ability to blend subtle tonalities with raw emotion, his work captures the weight of history in a manner that is both stark and beautiful. This series, like his broader body of work, is a testament to his deep connection with place and memory, offering us a compelling exploration of what remains beneath the surface of our lives." Gomma
"Under the earth, under the trees, under the pavement of the sidewalks, ruins of synagogues and graves full of bones. What we see on the surface replaces what we can no longer see. A city returned to its banality. The trees and snowy streets continue the erasure of bodies and names. Here, everything separates me from the depth of the place. The grasses are no longer charred, the bullets have disappeared and the turned over earth seems hardened by silence. Of the thousands of Jewish children, women and men taken by force to the hills of the city to be shot in the back of the head and piled on top of the naked bodies of those who came before them, almost nothing remains. no trace. Neither monument, nor repentance. Only a stone engraved and erected in the middle of the brambles, out of sight, escapes erasure.« Antoine Lehcarny
About the photographer
Antoine Lecharny
Antoine Lecharny is a photographer and visual artist born in 1995, who graduated from ENSCI-Les Ateliers in 2019. At the age of twenty, he traveled to Transylvania to photograph and share the lives of Romani families. Alongside them, he sought to capture the bonds that unite these families and their relationship to an often-hostile environment. In 2021, he won the Jury Prize for Emerging Young Talents at the Planches Contact festival in Deauville. That same year, in collaboration with Henri Frachon, he won the Audi Talents award for a sculptural project that was later exhibited at the Palais de Tokyo. His approach to photography also extends to the form of books. Alongside published works and self-published pieces, he creates experimental books and leporellos directly from prints and texts. His work has been exhibited in France and abroad. In 2023, his first solo exhibition in Paris, titled Côté fenêtre, was showcased at the Sit Down gallery. Since 2022, several of his photographic series have become part of the Marin Karmitz collection.
