A Photographic Life-447: 'The Proust Photo Quiz' with Photographer Alex Majoli

In this week’s episode photographer, Alex Majoli takes on our ‘Proust Photo Quiz’…

The Proust Questionnaire is a set of questions answered by the French writer Marcel Proust. Proust answered the questionnaire in a confession album, a form of parlour game popular at the end of the 1890s. The album, titled An Album to Record Thoughts, Feelings, etc.was found in 1924 and published in the French literary journal Les Cahiers du Mois. Our ‘Proust Photo Quiz’ is an adaption of the original text.

Alex Majoli

Majoli was born in Ravenna, Italy, in 1971 and attended the Art Institute in Ravenna. His career began to develop after he photographed the closing of the notorious insane asylum on the island of Leros in Greece, which resulted in his first monograph, Leros. Majoli’s early interest in psychiatric care led him to Brazil, which marked the beginning of his twenty-year-long, ongoing project, Tudo Bom, a body of work documenting the multi-layered country, and the extremes found in the darker side of its society. The experience of photographing people in all kinds of circumstances led him to explore the idea that everyone is an actor in their own life. This is why he started the ongoing project, Scene in which his images become scenes in which people, through their performances, express themselves in what becomes a film set or a theater stage. Majoli’s work is held in various public collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, International Center of Photography, MUFOCO and Mucem. Among many honours, he has received the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund Fellowship for Humanistic Photography, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an ICP Infinity Award, a Getty Images Grant. He was NPPA Photographer of the Year and received an OPC Feature Photography Award. His books include One Vote (2004), Libera Me (2010), Congo (2015), Andante (2018), Scene (2019) and Opera Aperta (2021). Majoli joined Magnum Photos in 1996, becoming a full member in 2001 and lives in New York. www.magnumphotos.com/photographer/alex-majoli/

Dr.Grant Scott

After fifteen years art directing photography books and magazines such as Elle and Tatler, Scott began to work as a photographer for a number of advertising and editorial clients in 2000. Alongside his photographic career Scott has art directed numerous advertising campaigns, worked as a creative director at Sotheby’s, art directed foto8magazine, founded his own photographic gallery, edited Professional Photographer m