When I was younger, I wanted to be a writer and, in the last year before the collapse of the USSR, I was in Prague taking “visual notes” to inspire my writing and support my memory. One day, I came across the face of an older man, so ambiguous and beautiful. From this moment, things were reversed and images became more immediately tangible to me than words. That said, photography is also about creating a narrative, and my approaches to both writing and creating images share similar predilections. I certainly prefer allusions to descriptions. I love ambiguity.
I cannot imagine going somewhere without reading up on it first. I’ll visit Google Maps and Google Earth and try to imagine the streets, but of course the reality is always a surprise, with nuances I haven’t anticipated. This was taken in Lahore, to where I have returned almost every year for a decade. When I first came to Pakistan, I was overwhelmed and puzzled, but the country and its people grew on me.
I love the process of investigating new places, getting lost and identifying plots, characters and overtones. This past winter I had been staging portraits of local artists, and was riding my scooter on my way to meet one of them when I spotted this hand. As I rode past a large church, I saw the fingers popping out from behind a wall and thought: “Oh, that’s funny. I just saw the hand of God!”
I was in a hurry and could not stop, but I promised myself I’d return. When I did, I knocked at the door and had to persuade the guy in charge to let me in. It was a Christian church, and Christians are a religious minority discriminated against in Pakistan – the barbed wire in the picture indicates those safety concerns. Still, I was able to convince him of my innocuousness. The wall I’d seen the fingers poking above was part of the church’s compound and, once inside, I found they were attached to a huge concrete hand, one of a pair, surrounded by a flowerbed. The framing was evident. I just waited for a bird.
There are many other photographs I might have chosen as my best, but I enjoy the incongruity of this one. The way the fingers seem to be interfering with overhead wires is also what makes it for me. Lahore suffers daily power outages and it felt like I’d found the culprit. I have produced a series of diptychs with my black and white photographs of Pakistan, bringing together images in a bittersweet way. In one, a jumping boy seems twinned with a tangled mess of power cables, a further reference to the frequent cuts. In another of the diptychs, the photograph of the hand appears on the left while, on the right, a little girl stretches her own hand towards it.
Photography, for me, is a way of being in the world, of going into the world. It allows me to transmute my obsessive relationship with time, to meet people, tell their stories, and transmit emotions through the evocative power of images. Most of my earliest pictures were landscapes, although always with traces of human activity. At first, I was too shy to interact with people – I had to learn.
When taking photographs in Pakistan, it’s impossible not to be noticed, especially using a scooter in a country where it’s rare for women even to ride a bicycle. I am moved when old ladies greet me, and I can see in their eyes they are happy for me to have this freedom they never experienced.
Marylise Vigneau’s CV
Born: Ambilly, France
Trained: Master’s in comparative literature, University of La Sorbonne, Paris. A perspective-changing photography workshop with Philip Blenkinsop and Gary Knight.
Influences: “Novels influenced me more than anything. I was a solitary child, and I used to devour books. Among the photographers Michel Vanden Eeckhoudt, Chris Killip, August Sander, Claudine Doury, Aun Raza, Sally Mann, Robert Frank, Jason Eskenazi and Josef Koudelka.”
High point: “Every time a person agrees to be part of a project and be photographed. It is always a precious gift.”
Low point: “During insomnias, I sometimes imagine images that are impossible to produce. A mix of reminiscences, imagination and unlikely happenstances.”
Top tip: “I have been a curious and disobedient child, I became a curious and disobedient woman, and I owe my utmost joys, my dearest discoveries to these discredited qualities. Investigate, and find your narrative and an aesthetic to serve it. Reflect and dissent, including with your own prejudices.”
• Marylise Vigneau is a finalist in the Portfolio category, professional competition, Sony world photography awards. Exhibition at Somerset House, London, until 1 May
