Thursday May 9, 2013
Target: the middle class
By LOUISA LIM
star2@thestar.com.my
Consumer class concerns: Francòise Huguier’s Petit Couple K POP, taken in Kuala Lumpur in 2012, captures the K-Pop craze that has swept over urban youth in many Asian countries. Photographers are attracted to Asia’s extremes — the lives of the rich and poor. But what of the region’s fast-growing consumer class? One woman spent two years capturing these ‘drivers of modern society’ with her camera.
FRANCOISE Huguier is on the phone from France, and she sounds slightly miffed. “There’s no respect for photographers these days because anyone can pretend to be one on Facebook,” she says.
You can’t blame her for feeling this way. A familiar face in France’s art and fashion circles, Huguier – whose last name is pronounced Oo-gier with a pucker of the lips and a curl of the tongue, and who will not disclose her age (“You do not ask a Frenchwoman her age,” was her curt reply when I did) – started out as a freelance photojournalist for a variety of magazines in 1980s Paris. She’s part of a vanishing breed of photographers, moulded and wrought into being by an era in which images and the people who produced them were exalted and cherished.
“The magazines celebrated humanism,” says Huguier of the 1980s. “Photographers got paid a lot more money for telling a story.”
However, neither a lack of recognition nor her father’s fervent disapproval stopped Huguier from pursuing her passion for more than three decades. She claims there is nothing she cannot capture, and her diverse portfolio of work – which encompasses the world of cinema, politics, culture and fashion – is a testament to this.
Tomorrow, she will be in Kuala Lumpur for a different type of photography exhibit. Entitled Vertical/Horizontal, Indoor/Outdoor Exploration Of South East Asians’ Lives, the exhibition offers insight into the middle-class in three South-East Asian capitals, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok. It’s the culmination of an ambitious project initiated in 2010, in which Huguier spent time with 100 families of different ethnicities with the aim of understanding and capturing their everyday lives.
“The middle class has been largely ignored by photographers because most of them are focused on capturing the lives of the rich or the poor,” says Huguier. “However, this is a group that has increased tremendously in the last 15 to 20 years. They are the main drivers of modern society.”
Huguier observed how a consumerist culture is taking over South-East Asian society during her two-year project. “Things have especially changed in KL compared to the 1980s, when I went there for work. I don’t recognise it any more. There are shopping malls everywhere,” she says.
While in KL, Huguier lived in the suburbs: “Uhh ... whatsisname ... an artificial-looking place where every house had a uniform design,” she says. Throughout her project, she noticed that, apart from looking the same, all the houses had something else in common: clutter.
“I didn’t know what the word messy meant before, but I know now,” she jokes. “Malaysian homes have lots of furniture and the owners of the house would always apologise for the mess.”
Huguier’s interest in Asia stems from her own childhood, having grown up in the region. “I lived in Cambodia from two years old onwards. My father was the director of a rubber plantation so we lived far away from the city,” she says.
The carefree life that Huguier led as a child in rural Cambodia was momentarily shattered when, at the age of eight, she and her brother were taken hostage by the Viet Minh, a communist independence coalition formed to oppose the French presence in Vietnam. Her experience is documented in the book J’avais huit ans (I Was Eight Years Old, 2005).
“At first I was happy because I didn’t have to go to school. But then I realised that my brother was suffering because they were trying to indoctrinate him with communist teachings,” she says.
Huguier was eventually rescued; she moved with her family back to France when she was 10. But the experience of spending eight months in a jungle camp played a definitive role in shaping Huguier into who she is today: fiercely independent, inquisitive and even a little odd. For one, she loves monsoons (“It’s so beautiful; it reminds me of how it rains in the jungles,” she says).
She adds: “I was a strong person but the experience made me stronger.”
Indeed, Huguier’s personality is glaringly obvious, even over the phone. She’s not afraid to express her contempt for conformity and conventions, and the heavy, almost haughty French accent with which she utters her raspy sentences and the throaty laughs that pepper her conversation may make certain words impossible to make out – but not her character.
Asia impacted her in other ways too; as a young adult, she ached to recapture the aesthetic sensations of her youth. “I was very interested in Asian culture and popular art,” she says. “Memories of the paintings on the rickshaws in Indonesia, the advertising blinds in the shops and the Chinese travelling theatres of Malacca, all of this have stayed with me forever,” she says.
Like her hero, American photographer and filmmaker Robert Franck, Huguier began by providing outsiders with a fresh and nuanced view of different societies through her still image: “My goal always is to open people’s eyes about other worlds,” she says.
And like Franck, Huguier is also interested in writing and videos. She has a few published books – among them, En route pour Behring (On The Way To Behring), an account of her solitary travels in Siberia, and Secrètes (Secret), a book that captures the lesser-seen side of African women. In 2008, she helped produce the film Kommounalka, about everyday life in the collective flats of St Petersburg, Russia.
“I want to be more than a photographer,” says Huguier. “And in a sense, it’s easier for a woman to make her way through the male-dominated world of photography because I can use my charm.”
Her next project? The middle class again, this time in South Korea.
“Everyone is fascinated with Korea,” she says. “The influence from their TV series and pop music, especially in Asia, is staggering. It’s not necessarily a bad thing because it shows that the youths in Asia are not as detached from the world as the youths in France.”
The Vertical/Horizontal, Indoor/Outdoor Exploration Of South-East Asians’ Lives photography exhibition by Françoise Huguier will be held at The Westin Kuala Lumpur (No.199, Jalan Bukit Bintang) from tomorrow to May 24. The exhibition is part of the French Art and Film Festival 2013; for more information on the festival, go to faff.com.my.
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