In 1918 after the First World War ended, a French soldier was repatriated to France from a German prison camp. He had no memory and no identity cards. He was sent to a psychiatric hospital where doctors named him “Mangin”. They published his photo in the newspaper in the hope his family would identify him. 300 families claimed Mangin as their missing husband, son, father or brother. Eventually Mangin was identified as one Octave Félicien Monjoin. Ironically his family had never looked for him after the war, presuming him dead. The other families never gave up believing he was their family member and the legal battles they created ensured that he spent the rest of his life in the psychiatric hospital. Mangin/Monjoin the man with so many identities and so many families, ironically died alone in the hospital of starvation in 1942. Mangin was a non identity, to these many families he was “an absence into which anything could be read and any love poured.” (Nicolson, 2005)
This print series Records Mangin as 18 identities and portraits before he became Octave Félicien Monjoin. The series is still. It is never changing and is non linear. There is no narrative progression thorough the print series. Mangin’s identity was a lone, silent amnesiac who lived in his own mind. This identity was applied by others, to the multiple potential pasts of missing men. This series records 18 potential identities that work together or as single pieces. They record a single man: Mangin, an externally constructed identity who existed for 20 years, but at the same time existed as multiple people with their multiple identities.