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, we traveled little. The world was distant, concrete and inaccessible at once. These photographs were windows opened onto a distant world — not screens, not feeds. Windows we opened slowly, closed, reopened. We had time to inhabit them.

There was also the radio.

Not just for music — for the dial. That bakelite face where city names were engraved in golden letters: London, Paris, Rome, Hilversum, Sottens, Berlin. Names we couldn’t yet pronounce quite right, that we read like reading 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 novels I was reading. London was misty and cobblestoned, inevitably — that’s where Phileas Fogg prepared his luggage with clockmaker precision, before cleaving 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 is shipwrecked, 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 overlap, sometimes, when I arrive somewhere for the first time — and recognize a place I’ve never actually seen.

That’s where, I believe, it all began. Not with a camera. With a gaze.

—

I didn’t always travel. And then one day, I began — late, yes, but all at once, with urgency. As if something, long contained, had finally overflowed. I needed to see, to walk, to move away. Books had prepared me. Silences too.

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

—

Photographing, for me, isn’t capturing. That word has always seemed a bit violent to me — as if the image were prey. No. It’s rather 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 would say quite so precisely.

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

There is in every photo I take 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 succeed each other, overlap, call to each other. I am 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 lights, 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 rather a way of keeping an inner journal. Photos are pages. They say: I was there. I saw that. Something in me moved.

Maybe that’s also what photographing is: trying 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 searching for 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 aren’t only outside. They are in the angle we choose. In what we decide to keep, and what we leave outside the frame.

And if this journey has a destination — if there’s an island somewhere — then let it be a pretext for everything else: for detours, for slowness, for the unexpected. For what we discover along the way. And especially, for what we discover within ourselves.

That’s why I photograph.