beaux livres : photo, architecture, art

Since 1983, photographer and writer Patrick Bard has been photographing his nephew. He began, without really knowing why, when his nephew was sixteen. At the time, he was called Jean-Pierre.

After becoming a truck driver in Sarcelles, he married young and had two children. When his relationship to gender began to change in the mid-1990s, Patrick Bard continued to take pictures of him. Or rather, of her. Because Jean-Pierre officially became Jeanne in 2001. Jeanne dated both men and women, and finally fell in love with a woman in 2008. Two years later, Jeanne decided to transition back to male and reversed her gender identity.

More than anything, his nephew Jeanne decided that the question of gender wasn’t fixed and that it wasn’t an issue for him. My Nephew Jeanne is a book where the reader follows the narrative from the writer’s perspective, written in a literary style: from his nephew’s growing awareness to his unwavering determination, against all odds, to change his body and become a woman. Unusually for a book about gender, the reader returns to his male identity after all the struggles to embrace femininity. The text, accompanied by photographs by Patrick Bard, as well as photographs from Jean-Pierre/Jeanne’s family album, allows the reader to intimately follow the life of this character.

Reduce