There were books, long before the camera.
Thick encyclopedias with slightly yellowed pages, smelling of glue and printed paper. I was nine, ten, maybe twelve. I would open them without looking for anything in particular, and that is precisely why I found everything: each page carried me elsewhere. A fjord in Iceland, a market in Morocco, seabirds on a wind-battered cliff. I didn’t know these images were working on me. I thought I was merely looking.
In the 1970s and 1980s, people traveled little. The world was concrete and yet out of reach. In an age without screens or feeds, these photographs were windows you opened slowly, closed, and opened again. You had time to let them live inside you.
And then there was the radio. For the music, of course, but above all for the dial, that Bakelite dial where the names of cities were engraved in gold letters: London, Paris, Rome, Hilversum, Sottens, Berlin. Names I couldn’t yet pronounce properly and which I read like a poem whose every word you don’t understand, letting the sound do its work.
Those cities existed mostly in my teenage head, and perhaps that was better. They were the settings of the novels I read. London was foggy and cobbled, naturally: it was where Phileas Fogg packed his bags with a watchmaker’s precision before going around the world in eighty days. Rome smelled of warm stone. Berlin had something grave about it, a crack somewhere.
And then the islands, the ones where you are shipwrecked and learn to look at what you would never otherwise have looked at. I got lost with Robinson, inventing shelters, paths, reasons to go on. Those books taught me less about geography than this: the journey begins long before departure.
I discovered reality later. But those images never quite left. They still sometimes overlay what I see when I arrive somewhere for the first time, and I get the feeling of recognizing a place I have never seen.
That’s where it all began, I think: with a way of looking, long before the camera.
I haven’t always traveled. And then one day I began, late, but all at once and with urgency, as if something long contained had finally overflowed. I needed to see, to walk, to get away. Books had prepared me for it, and so had silences. In landscapes and faces, I was looking for what they awakened in me.
Photographing, for me, is a way of staying attentive. Of being truly there when the light does something unexpected, when a face opens for a thousandth of a second, when a landscape says something no word could say as truly.
The camera forces you to look before you press the shutter. And sometimes you don’t press it: you look, and that’s enough.
I don’t know whether there is a question behind each of my photos. Sometimes I think so, but first I look, with the curiosity of the child who leafed through encyclopedias and never really closed those pages. Places and faces follow one another, overlap, call out to each other. I admire this world, ours, which we haven’t quite managed to destroy yet and which still resists us. I admire the diversity of living things, of people, of lights, of ways of being in the world.
Sometimes I prepare for a long time: I wait, I come back, I circle around a moment I haven’t yet managed to capture. Other times it’s almost instinctive. Something happens, and the hand follows before the mind has had time to decide.
Light, framing and texture matter enormously to me, but I’m not looking for beauty for its own sake, in the cold sense of the term. My photographs are more like the pages of an inner notebook. They say that I was there, that I saw this, and that something moved in me.
Photographing is perhaps trying to reconcile what we had imagined with what we found. Or, on the contrary, letting the unexpected upend what we thought we knew.
The child of the encyclopedias was looking for worlds. The teenager listening to city names on the dial was building others, populated with heroes and departures. The adult who photographs looks for the same thing, but has understood that worlds are also found in the angles we choose, in what we decide to keep and what we leave out of the frame.
And if this journey has a destination, if there is somewhere an island, then, as in that old poem*, let everything else serve as a pretext: the detours, the slowness, the unexpected, what we discover along the way, and above all what we discover within ourselves.
That’s why I photograph.
* Constantine Cavafy’s poem “Ithaka.”
