From a distance, Pitcairn looks like an enchanting Eden. British confetti lost in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, with white sand beaches bordered by turquoise waters, it especially marked the spirits as the desert island where, in 1790, the rebels of the Bounty. Fleeing British justice, the mutineers ganged up against their captain settled on the island with Tahitian captives, never to return to Europe. An adventure that inspired no less than four films and gave birth to a lasting romantic legend.
It is precisely because she is wary of golden legends that Irish photographer Rhiannon Adam looked at Pitcairn. As a child, she was too immersed in dreams of extraordinary adventures to ignore the other side of them. “When I was 7 years old, she says, my parents bought a boat, left everything, and we sailed around the world for eight years. » The young woman has kept traces of this very special childhood in the middle of the ocean, without a home port or lasting relationships. “There was no comfort, and above all it was a very lonely, confined life. This certainly played a role in my parents’ divorce,” she believes. From this experience, she retained a deep aversion to boats for a long time.
The situation on Pitcairn, where fewer than forty people live today, all descendants of the mutineers and isolated from the world, reminded her a lot of her childhood as a captive at sea. She spent three months on the island in 2015, and found pulled out a book, Big Fence/Pitcairn Island (Blow Up Press, 2021), which paints in small touches, with images and dozens of documents, a dark and enigmatic portrait of this society with heavy secrets.
On site, in fact, the atmosphere remains weighed down by the trial and the scandal which hit the island in 2004, when, following complaints from women who had left Pitcairn, a vast investigation revealed rapes and sexual assaults. widespread inflicts by men on very young girls, sometimes as young as 8 years old, with the consent or at least the silence of the community.
Several men from the island were then convicted of raping minors, including the mayor at the time, Steve Christian, a Pitcairn luminary, a direct descendant of the mutinous captain Fletcher Christian. The only police officer on the island, Brenda Christian, had to arrest her own brother in this case. “Big Fence”, which gives its title to the book, is the name of the former mayor’s house, where the photographer once stayed.
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