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In Non Fiction

Henri Kisielewski

Nominated by
PhotoIreland
"To give truth the colour and narrative force of fiction," this was Truman Capote's ambition when he wrote ‘In Cold Blood’, the true account of a quadruple homicide in 1960s Kansas. It is the starting point for Non Fiction, a work of lyrical documentary that explores the porous boundary between fact and fiction in photography. Since its beginnings, photography has entertained a complex relation to truth: even the most 'objective' portrait will necessarily involve decisions relating to location, light and pose. In Non Fiction, this tension is pushed to its extreme through a variety of visual strategies, deployed to blur the lines. Images based on rumours, local news stories and chance encounters accumulate and coalesce, forming a narrative that is fluid and multidirectional. It is up to the audience to interpret this narrative, to find keys into it, to give the work meaning. Everything is real, everything is fake, but one thing is certain: truth is at least as strange as fiction.
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The Artist
Henri Kisielewski
Nominated in
2025
By
PhotoIreland
Lives and Works in
Henri Kisielewski is a self-taught French-British photographer based in London. His work addresses the relationship between images to the real world – broadly speaking he makes photographs about photography. Research-led and informed by his studies in human geography, Henri’s work explores themes of memory, photographic representation and the porous boundary between fact and fiction in documentary media. Working primarily with medium format film and allowing room for chance, Henri’s practice is characterised by a documentary approach based on a conceptual framework. He has developed long-term projects in France, the UK, Iceland, Morocco and Portugal, among others. Henri is currently working on a new ambitious and multi-faceted project in New York State: a collective portrait of Agloe, a fictional town that came to exist in the real world. Through a variety of visual strategies – photographs, archive images, video interviews – the work probes the ‘documentary’ image in a post-truth era.
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