Monuments, a closure.

14 Apr

I’ve been returning to Monuments lately, sitting with the images, the sessions, the conversations that shaped them.

This project has travelled with me from 2018 to 2024, slowly, steadily, almost quietly.
It began as a question about how we look at bodies, and what we inherit when we raise a camera.
Over time, it became something else: a study of strength, structure, and the refusal to perform softness on demand.

Most of the work was done in my garage.
A concrete floor, a black backdrop, one or two lights.
Nothing ornamental.

That stripped-back space has always felt like a truth-telling device. When there’s nothing to lean on, the attention returns to the body, the pose, the relationship.

As Hannah Tasker-Poland once wrote, the simplicity “brings the focus right back to the source, the photographer, the subject, and the creative relationship between them.”
She captured it perfectly.

The series draws on my research into 19th‑century French sculpture, those familiar figures of women kneeling, imploring, gazing upward.
Always softened. Always yielding.

Monuments pushes against that lineage.

Legs as columns, backs as roofs, hands as windows.
The body as architecture.
The body as self‑possessed.
The body as something other than an invitation to be interpreted.

What has mattered most is collaboration.

Every person who stepped into that small space shaped the work with me.
Their reflections on vulnerability, unlearning, strength, and the relief of not having to be “pretty”, sit inside the project as much as their bodies do.
I’ve never believed in the myth of the lone author.
These images exist because of shared trust, shared risk, shared authorship.

Now that the series is complete, I feel a sense of closure, not an ending, but a settling.

Monuments has become an archive of encounters, each session its own negotiation of gaze, power, and care.
The work taught me as much about looking as it did about letting go.

If you’d like to spend time with the full series, it lives here: jocelynjanon.com/monuments

With gratitude

To everyone who stood in front of the camera, who trusted the process, who brought their strength, their questions, their humour, their hesitations, and their presence.
Thank you.

This work is yours.

Joanna, Hannah, M., Michelle, Nikki, Olivia, Sophie, and Sophie.

Thank you.