Cyril Crépin entered a French hospital with his camera and came out with something that is unsettling and moving at the same time.
His series “In VU” portrays patients who underwent reconstructive facial surgery, guided by surgeon Bernard Devauchelle, one of the world’s pioneers in face transplants. Crépin did not seek to soften anything. He photographed the scars, the asymmetries, the marks left by reconstruction, exactly as they are, head-on, without retouching that would make them easier for the viewer to look at.
The proposal is deliberately uncomfortable: it asks you to hold your gaze instead of looking away. There, in that exchange of glances with a stranger who survived something devastating, something other than pity emerges. There is recognition that this wounded body and this capacity to endure could also be yours.
