It is, in the grayness of winter and the graphic nudity of skinny trees, a place of unfathomable sadness. The shot is taken below the Pont du Bouc which links Rixheim to Ottmarsheim, in the Haut-Rhin.
The image does not really fill the enchanting canons of a postcard. Nothing but a no man’s land that only the followers of contemporary photography with a coldly documentary vocation and explorer of marginal territories will look with an inspired air.
But for François Nussbaumer, who pressed the trigger, the interest is quite different. “It was there that the body of Colette Ernst, a cleaning lady at the Mulhouse Automobile Museum, whose assassination has never been elucidated, was found in 1979,” he comments.
Crimes spanning more than a century and a half …
From then on, the place is no longer neutral. As…
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