Fonds consists of 75 b&w chromira photographic prints on Fuji Crystal Archive paper. The prints are on 11" by 14" paper and the photographs are various sizes according to the ratio of the original digital photograph. The photographs are from photographer Roger Lemoyne's documentation of Srebrenica after the massacre, the Democratic Repulic of Congo and Zaire 1996-2006. The collection is divided into 3 Series based on photographic projects by Roger Lemoyne and arranged in a narrative order by the photographer.
Lemoyne, Roger, 1954- : Roger Lemoyne graduated from Concordia University in Montreal with a degree in cinema production and worked in film and music for several years before taking up photography full time. Aesthetically, his photography has a cinematic quality and he shoots his stories narratively like a film with establishing shots, close-ups, detailed shots and landscapes. He uses all the elements of cinematic language to work in digital stills and each project, when viewed in the photographers narrative, is very cinematic. Lemoyne began to work as a photojournalist when he travelled to Somalia, Ethiopia and Sudan to cover the crisis in the Horn of Africa in 1991. Since then he has worked primarily on international issues photographing in over forty countries worldwide. Lemoyne has worked around the world to cover stories of war, genocide, mass exodus of populations from their homeland and stories of recovery from devasiting war conflicted regions. As a freelance photographer he has worked internationally with Canadian developmental agencies in over fifty countries world-wide. He has photographed in Bosnia-Hercegovina, Croatia, Israel/Palestine, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Albania, Romania, Cuba, Kosovo, Vietnam, Indonesia, Eritrea, India, Kashmir, Sierra Leone, Burkina Faso, Iraq, Haiti and Uganda as well as the U.S. and Canada In 2004 he won the prestigious Alexia Foundation Award for his work documenting war affected children. This project first materialized when he exhibited some of the work that he had been doing at the International Conference on War-Affected Children in Winnipeg in the fall of 2000. Lemoyne joined Gamma-Liaison in 1995 and he is represented by Redux Pictures in NewYork. He lives in Montreal, Canada. Roger Lemoyne is an old-fashioned photographer in the sense that he still believes, as Life magazine editors believed, in the power of pictoral story telling. His narratives unfold in a cinematographic fusion of documentary storytelling and strong plot line. Via the images, rather than creating a heavily word based narrative to describe his photographs, Lemoyne has given representation to some of the most horrific international events. In bearing witness to these events as a freelance journalist, Lemoyne has been able to work free of the burden of advertisers desires. Consequently his pictoral stories, not unlike the initial work of Magnum photographers especially the international work of Canadian photojournalist Kryn Taconis whose Fonds are part of the Library and Archives collection. Lemoyne's work is easily compared to international Magnum photographer, Kryn Taconis. "Kryn Taconis"s eye south the human element in events, and the oberserver feels the empathy he had for each of his subjects, never exploiting the dramatic aspects of the situations he photographed."(Kryn Taconis, Photojournalist). Lemoyne photographs in regions for extended periods, returning again and again to sites like Srebrenica to witness, as time unfolds, the dramatic cycle of war, devestation, grief, repatriation and rebuilding. This is no small feat in a journalistic world dominated by sensationalism, speed, and a short attention span. Lemoyne doesn't go out to regions in order to produce the shots that will gain him a lot of money and front page representation. Lemoyne is an incarnation of the free-spirited, vagabonds that Mary Blume writes about in her introduction to After the War was Over, a collection of Magnum photographs: "The photographers were spirited although usually poor and cold...they lived in cheap hotels...we were a bunch of gypsies, street photographers...the intellectual excitement was immense." Since magazines like Life and Paris-Match and other pictorial magazines have ceased to exist, the work of a vagabond photojournalist is difficult though not without an audience and ardent supporters include new Canadian magazines like BorderCrossings and The Walrus which frequently feature photo stories.
