We Were Never Meant to Survive

North America is haunted by the violence of its colonial history. A promised land fantasized by a handful of white religious dissidents fleeing Europe, it was torn from its natives to be exploited by slaves imported from Africa. Through the faces of the descendants of these peoples who founded the United States, author-photographer Marion Gronier seeks to resurrect the ghosts that haunt this history and to attest to the persistence of the violence that was instituted in American society by a separation and hierarchization of the races. For six years, she photographed three communities: Native Americans in Arizona, New Mexico and Montana, African-Americans in New Orleans, Louisiana, and Mennonites (an evangelical Christian Anabaptist community) in Pennsylvania.
Her work is part of the reflection carried out today by decolonial studies, which denounce and deconstruct the colonialist structures on which Western societies have been built in order to dominate, exploit and objectify the world, and of which photography is a product as much as a tool. Marion Gronier sums up her project in these words: "To highlight these structures is already to undermine them insofar as one of their strengths is their invisibility and their naturalization. This reflection led me to become aware of my position as a white European artist and to question my artistic medium, its uses and its powers, in order to bring back the ghosts that haunt it.

To express the violence still present in North American colonisation, the photographer uses the codes of forensic anthropometry invented at the end of the 19th century by the criminologist Alphonse Bertillon: a close-up of the face, an immobile subject, a frontal gaze, central framing, coldness and neutrality of expression. These codes, applied to colonised populations, were used to establish a typological classification intended to "scientifically prove" their genetic inferiority and legitimise their subjugation.
In order to better deconstruct them, to "liberate the photographic portrait from this oppressive function [...] and the photographed subjects from their assignment to the status of object or victim", Marion Gronier reintroduces this taxonomy but by subjecting it to alterations: on the one hand she also applies it to a population that should not be subject to it - the Mennonites, a social group of whites living in strict observance of the Holy Scriptures -, which provokes a displacement of alterity. On the other hand, by taking the decision not to caption these portraits, which are thus freed from the identifying burden they are supposed to carry, and invested with a radical autonomy.
Placed occasionally between the portraits, quotations from legal texts that have shaped the history of the communities photographed inscribe this important work in the depth of American history.

The title of the book, translated into French as Nous n'étions pas censées survivre, is borrowed from the poem "A Litany for Survival" (1978) by Audre Lorde (1934-1992), an American poet, feminist and lesbian activist, committed to the civil rights movement in favour of African-Americans. The cover photograph, showing a column of American soldiers after the surrender of Indians in South Dakota in 1891, is from the collections of the Library Of Congress.

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