You work with analog photography and are inspired by experimental techniques : your images seem to move towards a certain form of abstraction, an erasure of contours, a disappearance. Could you tell us more about your creative process?

 

My interest in photography lies in its ability to make impressions visible. Those provided to us by reality, the experiences we go through, our reactions to phenomena. It is this sensitivity that I try to translate into the photographic image. This is another way of "documenting" reality, of accounting for it. It is to give the possibility of expressing a sidelong glance at reality. So far I have worked exclusively with film for various reasons, the main one being slowness. An essential point in my artistic vision. However, I do not close doors. I believe in finding the right balance between the way things are done and what is being shown. We shouldn't prevent ourselves from trying something else if inclination and opportunity arise. As for the experimental character: I am self-taught in photography. I researched a lot on my own, and learned from books. This implies from the beginning a lot of trials, disruptions, surprises and a certain freedom taken and asserted towards standards, codes, expectations. But I see photography as an infinite practice in a way. It is always possible to seek, develop, try, go beyond what we already master.

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Dance, philosophy, poetry : your influences are multiple. How do they enter into dialogue with your photographic practice?

 

I consider very important the idea of opening up possibilities. My influences come from various fields and I like the idea of having a clear and wide horizon, without restricting myself when it comes to my sources of inspiration. The intersection of different fields of knowledge is a promise of enrichment, an inexhaustible source of knowledge. The disciplines have things to say to each other and we should not be embarrassed to convene them together. Dance is the relationship to the body, the space, the skin, the air. There are the volumes, the shapes that we create. It is becoming aware of one's position in space, static or mobile. It's about interacting with what comes in your way. And finally, that's exactly what happens in photography when I go to a specific territory. It is always a question of asking ourselves where we stand in relation to the object observed and photographed. It's trying to enter the landscape; to be in a corporeal contact with matter. And this attitude, in itself, is already philosophical and poetic for me. We take the time to question our situation, our presence in the world. About what is inside and what is outside. So this fieldwork is intimately linked to phenomenology. From practice to theory, or vice versa, there is only one step (it still has to be taken!). The idea of intersection, of interlacing, feeds my experimentation and my photographic thinking.

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In the text that accompanies La Reine des Tamarins, you talk about a "sauvage nature, original and bare, without a trace of human presence". What is the wild for you and how do you relate to it ?

 

There is something that touches me deeply in unhabited spaces. It often comes down to finding areas where the possibility of establishing human life has been (still is) difficult if not impossible. This is the promise of a nature without human beings. Of a nature that carries only the traces of its own history, and that lives and evolves in its proper rhythm.  Places spared by our imprint. You can go there, appreciate them, wander around, but you are always invited, a guest. At some point you have to leave. I find that these places (the series La Reine des Tamarins brings together landscapes taken in the Mediterranean Sea off Marseille, on glaciers in the Monte Rosa massif in Italy, at the foot of the cliffs in the province of Aragon in Spain or in the Hérault Gorges in France,…) invite us to be discreet. They make us feel our otherness. Radiate with beauty and strength. This is what I call the "wild".