The man in front of his environment – 2010

It has been 15 years or so that I walked, with my camera, throughout the world.

I like that.

And yet it started rather badly, at a time of a great love crisis, following a painful separation which led me back to the demons of major loneliness, things which I was not unaware of when I was child… Well, back then, I needed to walk through it, you can trust me.

What was important to me then was to share this loneliness, this inner horror, while going to seek it inside others…

Since then, I couldn’t stop to photograph people alone, isolated guys, on standby, in pain and suffering. And as strange as it can appear, it is through this process that my photo techniques have really progressed, by burning films, while looking to put on the same image a human being and what surrounded him. A true obsession, if one shall analyse this!

It took years. My grieving times obviously went by and I aged (maybe). I knew different girlfriends. And other dead ends, also… well, you know the stuff.

But lonely people keep on touching me. Hearts or “isolated” souls, we can encounter some of them everywhere on the whole Planet. From Paris to Calcutta while passing by Nijni Novgorod or Mananjary, each street is filled with them. You just have to pay attention.

Days, weeks or moments, seconds of loneliness, you’ll never truly know. it’s your shot that records it “for ever”.

To tell that, to show faces confronted with the environment, physical reality folded by the effort of the existence and survival, it is not very complicated. It is even a common feature for a human being. It is terrifying and beautiful at the same time. This is an easy work, really.

But to realize, years later, that all the photos are the same ones with the same pain in it, I mean somewhere in the shot… That thinking, that distance, it is another story.