gignouxphotos

I am an award-winning documentary photographer and founder of Gignoux Photos, which produces documentary photography and film projects focusing on socio-political and environmental issues around the world. I am committed to exposing the effects of displacement on communities around the world. My most exhibited body of work, Homeland Lost, juxtaposes portraits of Palestinian refugees with their former homes in Israel. I have been a regular visitor to the Saharawi refugee camps in Algeria, building relationships and recording camp life since 2005. For my recent Arts Council-funded project, “You can see me, but I don’t exist,” I used a camera obscura to document asylum seekers living in limbo in the UK. Alongside my work documenting refugee communities, Gignoux has for the past ten years been investigating and recording the impact of fossil fuels extraction and metals mining and refining on local communities. My photographs show the way in which landscapes have been permanently altered to make way for mining, scarred by the infrastructure of the mining industry, and poisoned by pollution of the air, soil, and water. The NCCA (National Centre for Contemporary Art) invited me to participate in a residency in Yekaterinburg, Russia in 2009. Photographs taken during the residency were published in my book, "Russian Rust Belt", which looks at the effects of industrial decline and pollution on the people and landscape of the Urals region. In 2010, I began work on Oil Sands, which documents the effects of the bitumen extraction industry on the Alberta environment and communities. Oil Sands was developed into an award-winning photobook and selected for exhibition in Taxed to the Max, the Noorderlicht Photofestival, in 2019. Gignoux first visited the Appalachian region in 2012. In 2015, he released Appalachia: From Mountaintops to Moonscapes, a short documentary film shown at film festivals internationally and short-listed in 2016 for the AOP Awards.