Coral

This beautiful photobook embodies and supports the inextricable link between an Indonesian fishing village and the coral reef on which its survival depends. 

A photographic history in 130 photographs and four chapters like a relational sequence that plays out (and knots) infinitively: the coral, the human, the link and the actions of protection, like a chronological, didactic and circular journey, a relational sequence that plays out ad infinitum. 

Each one introduces a text and sometimes opens on a questioning. No legend here, only the humble testimony of the photographer, sharing the daily life of a community of former nomads, without water or roads, and on their dependence on this hybrid character, an animal living with a plant, which is coral. 

A total of 130 color and black & white images — a bias that exploits the full range of photographic renderings — constituting this advocacy carried out over six years of work and reporting. Martin Colognoli thus mixes simple and shimmering scenes from the daily life of fishermen, catching their smile, capturing their gaze, with monochrome shots of materials, reliefs and textures like an x-ray vision of the coral animal.