Portrait photographique

A fine portrait of Jorge Semprún, made ten years after the September 1994 publication of L’Écriture ou la vie. The book had taken fifty years to be written: “It had become very clear that I had replaced writing, which was memory and the past, with political adventure, which was by definition nourished by hope and the future — especially communist politics, since it proposes to change society. So there was nothing more effective for not being tied to the past and projecting oneself forward (…). I then read Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. And when the book came out, I said to myself: ‘You must go back, you have no right to remain in that innocence.’” (Interview of Jorge Semprún by Paul Alliès, Pôle Sud, no. 1, 1994, pp. 23–34).

A former student of Serge Gal, Emmanuel Berry specialized early on in large-format photography and black-and-white darkroom work. In 1992 he met Robert Frank, with whom he worked on the production and editing of several short films. He received the Ilford Prize in 1994.