Mathieu Pernot, winner of the HCB award in 2019, is currently exhibiting his photography project, “La Ruine de la Demeure”, at the Henri Cartier- Bresson Foundation in Paris.

Born in 1973, the French photographer, Mathieu Pernot takes a near documentary approach to depict the vast contrast between the great historical narratives and his family’s history on his journey through Lebanon, Syria and Iraq, despite all the complications of crossing borders due to the pandemic alongside arduous grants of entry permissions into conflict zones.

Mathieu Pernot’s journey focuses on emphasizing the juxtaposition of the innocence of photos from family albums and the beauty of a 3000 year history with the violence of present day sceneries in the Middle East.

The project, initiated by the uncovering of Pernot’s grandfather’s travel album in 1926 containing an itinerary from Beirut to Mosul, is made out of 60 breathtaking prints, photos from family archives and photos found in the destroyed houses of Mosul. Pernot is one of Galeria Senda’s collaborative artists. In 2015, for the first time in Spain, he exhibited a series of his investigations which he called ‘Destruction’. This photographic narrative  emphasized the concept of demolition, inevitably, along with a political stance. He was also simultaneously able to portray the eternalization of this vanishment through photography, despite the fact that Nomad community was in denial of these events and wouldn’t the evanesce of their community to be recorded and seen. “When I took these photographs I wanted to express a moment of which is precisely a denial of a story,” said  Mathieu Pernot.