Notebooks

Death makes bodies disappear.

Forgetting makes lives disappear.

Sometimes I wonder which comes first.

It only takes a few generations for a face to become a name. Then for a name to become a date.

Curiously, some of our ancestors may outlive us. I wonder whether forgetting works more relentlessly than time.

For a long time, I thought I was photographing ruins.
Then I realized that wasn’t quite true.

What draws me is not the ruin itself, but the moment before it, or the one that follows. That instant when something is no longer what it once was, without yet having become something else.

An abandoned house is no longer truly a house. It is not yet a landscape.
A road is always suspended between a departure and an arrival.
A wasteland hesitates between industry and forest.

Even old photographs seem to linger somewhere between memory and oblivion.

I think I photograph thresholds. Places where the world seems to hold its breath, just before becoming something else.

I could say they divide the landscape, draw lines across it, or bear witness to human presence.

But none of those answers truly satisfies me. What draws me to them may lie elsewhere.

In their permanence. In their ability to outlive the purposes for which they were built.

At what point does an infrastructure cease to be a tool and become a trace?

People say that a road is a place of passage.
But a house is one as well.

We spend a few years there. We leave behind objects, voices, habits.
Then we move on.

The house remains a little while longer. The memory has already gone.

Perhaps every place is a place of passage.
You simply have to wait long enough.

Buildings change their purpose.

Landscapes change their use.

Generations come and go.

And yet, some presences seem to endure long after they have vanished.

I sometimes wonder whether forgetting is truly a property of memory, or simply another way for places to remain inhabited.

Landscapes preserve things we have forgotten.

An old road, a collapsed wall, a few trees planted in an alignment whose meaning has long since been lost.

I sometimes wonder whether a landscape tells us less about what we see than about what disappeared long ago.

A photograph always shows something that once existed.

But sometimes it ends up telling an entirely different story.

As places change, images change with them.

I sometimes wonder whether time turns every photograph into a question its author never thought to ask.

We often speak about what disappears.

Species. Landscapes. Ways of life. Memories.

But I always return to what remains.

Not because it is immutable, but because its persistence sometimes tells us more about an era than its disappearance.

I sometimes wonder whether photographing is less about documenting collapse than about searching for what endures through it.

We often say that a ruin bears witness to a vanished past.

Yet what strikes me is less what it once was than what it continues to be.

I sometimes wonder whether a ruin is, above all, a place where several layers of time still coexist.

Or are we photographing a span of time that far exceeds our own?

Every tree seems to belong to a different timescale.

When I photograph them, I often wonder whether the subject is not the tree itself, but the insignificant place a human life occupies beside it.

A road is never just a line.

It is an old decision that continues to shape a territory long after those who laid it out have disappeared.

I sometimes wonder whether landscapes are made as much of these forgotten decisions as they are of their geography.