1-1: Selfportrait and Portrait – Beginning of a Journey

The beginning

Gilles Porte, a French artist, photographer and filmmaker, tells us:

"One day, during her first year in preschool, I help my daughter to dress in the hallway of the school. Doing so, I realise that every coat rack is identified with a different ’stick-figure’.

Back home, I ask her to draw herself, using a a black paper and white pencil. Then, with my camera, I take a picture of her. Put togehter, drawing and picture form a diptych.

Owing to the complicity of the preschool director, the teachers and Juliette Robert (she assembles the dyptichs) I continue the adventure with all the children of the preschool ’Ecole des Cloys’ in Paris. They were 170 children, aged three to six.

Three times, during three years, I repeat this procedure: the children draw themselves, and I take a picture from them. And then, with black papers, white pencils and my camera, I depart for a journey across the globe."

The journey

Gilles Porte’s observation, his attention and his reaction led, step by step, to a journey around the world, in the course of which an extraordinery amount of drawings, photographs and films come about. All these documents focuss on the attempt of children in their first years of live to draw themselves as humans.

Today, as we will explain below, Gilles Porte holds an archive of more than 4000 drawings and an archive of more than 600 films, documenting more than 4000 children of 38 countries of all continents.

Most of the children did not go to school at the time of drawing and could not read and write. Their live conditions were, corresponding tot he different countries and places, very different.

A selection of drawings and films are published in a book, a film and a double-DVD, compiled and processed according to the the documentary, aesthetic and artistic motivations of Gilles Porte. Furthermore, different exhibitions were held and television programs were broadcasted (see below).