Winner 2024 Premi Fotografia Femenina
SASHA MONGIN
“ The dying man who would not die ”
Sasha Mongin
Born in the United States in 1989, Sasha Mongin graduated from Gobelins School in 2017. She lives and works in Paris. Her journey as a photographer began when, after graduating in Chinese language from INALCO, she moved to Shanghai and produced her first series on the rise of the Chinese middle class. In 2021, she shifted her photographic practice towards a more artistic and personal approach, exploring the boundaries between reality and imagination. Fascinated by heroic, whimsical, or fragile characters, as well as by magic, colors, and bursts of light, she now directs her work towards an aesthetic that transcends reality.
In 2023, she exhibited two series exploring masculinity at Galerie M, before embarking on a project about grief with the series entitled The Dying Man Who Would Not Die.
• SERIES •
The Dying Man Who Would Not Die
In a deeply personal series, photographer Sasha Mongin invites us into the intimate space of her family history.
“My father contracted HIV through a blood transfusion in 1982, following a heart surgery. AIDS allowed a rare virus to attack his brain, significantly impairing his motor and speech abilities. I was seven years old at the time, and the doctors told us he had only a few months to live. But he proved them wrong—he is still with us today.”
The images express the vision of a child who grew up for years under the certainty that her father would soon die.
“I remember denying my father’s illness, retreating into the illusion that he was secretly going out at night. I remember my mother’s loneliness when our friends and family gradually abandoned us. I remember feeling relieved that my father had AIDS and not a brain tumor, as I had been told until I was 12.
Death has always been a constant presence in my life and my parents’. They laugh about it, they cry about it, and they wait for it.”
While the subject is treated in both metaphorical and explicit ways, all the images are imbued with Sasha Mongin’s dreamlike and fantastical universe—her way of illuminating the sadness of this story with the love that filled her childhood.
