In 2013 Clémentine Schneidermann began photographing the Elvis Presley faithful who gather each year in Porthcawl, Wales, for what the publisher describes as the world’s largest festival devoted to the singer. Among them is Liz, who named her daughter Lisa Marie after Presley’s own daughter. Schneidermann kept returning through 2017, making portraits of fans — Alison and her son, Steve, Samantha, Ian — at close range and over time. The resulting series, which gives this, her first monograph, its title, records a gathering in which music and memory offer solace as much as spectacle.
The book extends that project with a second strand: Schneidermann followed Alison and her son from Wales to Memphis, where he performed under the stage name Johnny B. Goode. Johnny B. Goode, a visual travel diary of the pair’s transatlantic pilgrimage, is presented alongside I Called Her Lisa Marie. The pairing sets a Welsh seaside resort beside the city where Presley’s story began, drawing the two places into one continuous account of devotion and its rituals without forcing them into a single narrative arc.
Chose Commune’s 2018 volume carries 39 plates across 80 pages, with a 16-page leaflet, in a 25 x 25 cm section-sewn OTA-bound softcover. The square format suits the frontal, unhurried character of the portraits, while the binding and the leaflet allow photographs and text to sit in different registers. Editorial direction is by Cécile Poimboeuf-Koizumi, and editing and sequencing are shared by Poimboeuf-Koizumi and Vasantha Yogananthan; design is by Studio Julia, with texts by Schneidermann and Johnny B. Goode. The book appears in English and French.
Schneidermann, born in 1991 and dividing her time between Paris and South Wales, works on long-term projects and commissions and describes her approach as collaborative and playful, with lasting interests in communities, childhood, identity, and culture. That method is visible in the accumulated time and proximity behind these portraits, made with their subjects rather than about them. For collectors attentive to social documentary practice, this first monograph is a considered record of a specific community and a photographer’s early commitment to it.
