PRIVATE 49 – FRANCE présences

Such photographs are there not to gratify a curiosity, but are made in response to a feeling: it is not only the landscape we see, even if it takes solid form, and darkens or brightens in certain frames, or is transformed by the space under changing skies (teenagers wandering in the street, an abandoned bus-shelter in the distance), but rather it is the interior (of homes), the proximity (of faces), the torment or desire (of souls and bodies).
Such photographs propose a vision of something that is not so much in France (we could be beyond) as within France. Frozen moments on which no train window could give a view. This is to say that the image is a moment of fleeting magic, the same that Philippe Forest characterizes as “an imprint, trace, mark, notch” adding that it is “a sign empty of all meaning, testifying to nothing more than its pure presence in time, authenticating the passage of someone among the procession of days”.  (Franck Bijou)