non fiction

henri kisielewski

“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 had a complex relation to truth: even the most ‘objective’ portraits 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 e.g. staging, off-camera flash, subverting cinematic clichés. Images based on rumours, local news stories and chance encounters accumulate and coalesce, to form a narrative that is fluid and multidirectional.