Mathieu Asselin’s book Monsanto: A Photographic Investigation has won the $10,000 First PhotoBook Prize in the 2017 Paris Photo—Aperture Foundation PhotoBook awards. Published by Verlag Kettler and Acte Sud, the book combines original photos, old Monsanto
Mathieu Asselin’s book Monsanto: A Photographic Investigation has won the $10,000 First PhotoBook Prize in the 2017 Paris Photo—Aperture Foundation PhotoBook awards. Published by Verlag Kettler and Acte Sud, the book combines original photos, old Monsanto ads and archival material about the pesticide manufacturer. Dayanita Singh won PhotoBook of the Year for Museum Bhavan, her series of nine small, accordion-fold books contained within a clamshell box. (See: Photo Book Making: Dayanita Singh’s “Museum Bhavan.”)
In the United States, dozens of Monsanto sites (classified as sensitive by the Federal Environment Agency) are maintaining activities with severe sanitary and environmental consequences. In the name of human and environmental rights, scientists and institutions have already raised alarm. This photographic quest aims to raise awareness about Monsanto’s current practices to understand the impact of their activities on human beings and their environment. This work offers a photographic dive into the chemical company’s past and present. It combines the company’s archival documents and many portraits and landscapes directly affected by the environmental consequences of this industrial production.
Over the past five years, photographer Mathieu Asselin has devoted his life to researching and documenting the controversial history of Monsanto, a leading American corporation manufacturing agricultural chemicals and genetically modified food products. F
Over the past five years, photographer Mathieu Asselin has devoted his life to researching and documenting the controversial history of Monsanto, a leading American corporation manufacturing agricultural chemicals and genetically modified food products. For Monsanto: A Photographic Investigation, he has traveled throughout the country, from the PCB-contaminated creeks of Anniston, Alabama to the hazardous waste sites of Sauget, Illinois, photographing the landscapes and persons devastated by exposure Monsanto’s toxic products and the company’s monopoly on seeds, which has allowed it to drive local farmers out of business. Included in Asselin’s dark portrait of Monsanto are objects collected by the photographer himself: vintage advertisements, memorabilia, and newspaper clippings.
It also compelled the New York-based portrait photographer Mathieu Asselin to travel to Joplin to make photographs of the people who had lived through this disaster, amid the detritus left behind. “The level of destruction was such that during my five days there, every morning seemed like the first day again,” he told me. “What I saw was that within minutes the familiarity of the people of Joplin with their landscape had turned into complete unfamiliarity. I wanted to show that shift in my subjects.”
