Tu Mitonnes, 2019
Is he a photographer? Is he a graphic designer? Is he an image maker of the ordinary and the extraordinary? Griot of the Vosges and elsewhere?
Emmanuel Pierrot is a little and much more than all that. From his Vosges farm to his studio on the outskirts of Paris and the peaks of Kyrgyzstan, the world is his cabinet of curiosities, his living encyclopedia. Whether he is behind his camera, in his henhouse or cutting wood, he gleans with his eyes and ears the little things and the big things that make life. If it seems that the devil dwells in the detail, then Emmanuel Pierrot is its rabble-rouser.
He flushes out the last tomatoes and the first snow at the neck of the cross of the Moinats to turn them into never still lifes that become retinal persistence. Whether he’s illustrating an article on the philosopher Hartmut Rosa for Le Monde or photographing a meal tray at the hospital, he makes the air of time and the evils of this damn planet resonate with us to propose to reason, to move us and perhaps also to act. In this sense, he undoubtedly exercises the oldest profession in the world, that of the tracers of life that were already working on the walls of the Lascaux cave. Together, we have been fricking each other for a long time, every week in Libération.
Our dish of the day is called “Tu mitonnes”. It’s always in the same casserole dish, brazen with the seasons, the counter briefs, the first asparagus, pig’s feet and cherry time. The recipe is simple: since food is the first act of existence and often one of the last when it dies out, drinking and eating it are formidable gateways to the vast world but also the most hidden intimacy.
Tu Mitonnes therefore tells stories that nestle around the corner as well as on the other side of the earth. They are born in cabbages, in the hollow of a watermelon or a Morteau sausage and of course always end with recipes. Emmanuel Pierrot’s tour de force is to be both at the oven (the rascal he has just found a second-hand Lacanche) and in the studio for Tu mitonnes. He is its mitron, the loyal Mr. photographer, illustrator, visual artist, always with a good dose of humor and tender irony. Taste his “naughty carrots”, his “lentils in the snow”, his “mirabelles lurette”, his “trout melody for the summer”, you will see, they have a taste of coming back.
Jacky Durand, culinary wanderer at Libération
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