Henry Roy’s book, Impossible Island, a survey of 40 years of his photography, is threaded with images of sleepers and dreamers in different corners of the world – Thailand, Tunisia, his adoptive France, his native Haiti. Roy took this picture of a girl making an impromptu cradle of a wheelbarrow in Congo-Brazzaville in 2002. Like all of his most evocative photographs, it asks several questions of the viewer – but the overriding one seems to be: how sleepy do you have to be to take a nap here?
Roy’s photos often work this way: they create little mythologies that seem to take their subjects outside their particular time and place. As he noted of his practice in his 2017 book Superstition, what he is always restless for are images that “murmur the secret language of a world free from what contaminates us”. Here, the vibrant Sunday-best floral prints of the girl, the precision of her hair, seem to elevate her above the clay and dust of her surroundings. It comes as no surprise, looking at Roy’s pictures, that they have been cited as primary inspirations by cinematographers and film-makers, notably Oscar-winning director Barry Jenkins, who has suggested that he was inspired to create some of the visual sensuality of Moonlight by looking at Roy’s work.
The photographer moved from Haiti to France as a boy, but he feels he is expressing some of the legacy of his homeland, including voodoo traditions, in his way of seeing. “My relationship to the invisible, and to the world of the dead, imposed itself very early on in my artistic practice,” he said in one interview. “I am in search of the secrets hidden in colours and shapes. It is a real obsession. When I take a photo, I sometimes feel that each particle of matter contains the whole. Colour is a vehicle of incomparable power.”
Impossible Island is co-published by Loose Joints and the Art Gallery of Western Australia
