Why I Photograph

Before the camera, there were books.

Thick encyclopedias, with slightly yellowed pages that smelled of glue and printed paper. I was nine, ten, twelve perhaps. I would open them without looking for anything specific—and that’s precisely why I found everything. A photograph of an Icelandic fjord. A market in Morocco. Seabirds on a wind-battered cliff. I didn’t yet know that these images were working within me. I thought I was just looking.

In the 1970s, 1980s, people traveled little. The world was distant, concrete and inaccessible at once. These photographs were windows open onto a faraway world—not screens, not feeds. Windows that one opened slowly, closed, reopened. We had time to inhabit them.

There was also the radio.

Not only for the music—for the dial. That Bakelite dial where city names were engraved in golden letters: London, Paris, Rome, Hilversum, Sottens, Berlin. Names we didn’t yet quite pronounce, that we read as one reads a poem without understanding every word—letting the sound do its work.

Those cities didn’t really exist. They existed better than that: they were images constructed in my adolescent mind. Settings inhabited by the heroes of the novels I read. London was foggy and cobblestoned, naturally—that’s where Phileas Fogg prepared his luggage with a watchmaker’s precision, before cutting through the world in eighty days. Rome smelled of warm stone. Berlin had something grave about it, a crack somewhere.

And then there were the islands. Those where one washes ashore, where one learns to look at what one would never have looked at otherwise. I got lost with Robinson, I invented with him shelters, roads, reasons to continue. Those books didn’t teach me geography. They taught me something more useful: that the journey begins long before departure.

Reality, I would discover later. But those images never quite left. They still sometimes overlap when I arrive somewhere for the first time—and I recognize a place I’ve nevertheless never seen.

That’s where it all began, I think. Not with a camera. With a way of seeing.

I haven’t always traveled. And then one day, I began—late, yes, but suddenly, urgently. As if something, long contained, had finally overflowed. I needed to see, to walk, to move away. Books had prepared me. So had the silences.

It wasn’t landscapes or faces I was seeking. I was seeking what they awaken.

—

To photograph, for me, is not to capture. That word has always seemed a bit violent to me—as if the image were prey. No. It’s more a way of staying attentive. Of being there, truly there, at the moment when light does something unexpected, when a face opens for a fraction of a second, when a landscape says what no words could say as precisely.

The camera compels you to look before pressing. And sometimes, you don’t press. You just look. And that’s enough.

In every photograph I make, there’s an underlying question: what does this awaken in me?

Before pressing, I look. A curious gaze—that of the child who leafed through his encyclopedias, who never really closed those pages. Places and faces follow one another, overlap, call to each other. I’m fascinated by this world—ours, the one we haven’t quite managed to destroy yet, the one that still resists us. Fascinated by the diversity of the living, of people, of light, of ways of being in the world.

Sometimes I prepare for a long time. I wait. I return. I circle around a moment without yet catching it. Other times it’s almost instinctive—something happens, the hand follows before the mind has had time to decide.

It’s not an aesthetic quest in the cold sense of the term—even though light, framing, texture matter enormously. It’s more a way of keeping an interior notebook. The photographs are pages. They say: I was there. I saw this. Something in me moved.

Perhaps that’s also what photographing is: attempting to reconcile what we had imagined with what we find. Or on the contrary, letting the unexpected undo everything we thought we knew.

—

The child who leafed through encyclopedias was seeking worlds. The adolescent who listened to city names on a radio dial was building others, populated with heroes and crossings. The adult who photographs seeks the same thing—but he has understood that worlds are not only outside. They are in the angle you choose. In what you decide to keep, and what you leave out of frame.

And if this journey has a destination—if there’s an island somewhere—then may it be, as in that old poem*, a pretext for everything else: for detours, for slowness, for the unforeseen. For what we discover along the way. And above all, for what we discover within ourselves.

That’s why I photograph.