Prologue
HOME IS ANOTHER COUNTRY: A story in 3 parts
1 - Promised Land / 2 - Family Resemblances / 3 - The Hall of Mirrors
I left France in 2005 to settle in Germany.
Since then I've been coming back repeatedly to visit this corner of western France where my family is from.
Now living abroad long-term, I'm looking back with the eyes of an almost-foreigner.
In places that feel light-years away from life in Berlin, where mixed feelings at best dominated before I left, I now reconsider what I didn't notice before, what used to annoy me or leave me indifferent.
The act of photographing is, at the very least, showing curiosity. It transcends early perplexity and sharpens one's sense of inquiry.
That initial apathy during early trips was indeed powerful, but what else could I have done?
Over time, photographing became a way to react to the distance, to keep a connection, to bridge two realities of my existence, and to reconsider difficult events in my family's past. It also allowed me to rediscover, sometimes, beauty in the familiar.
~
This very long-term (and still ongoing) project is as much diary as topography. It's a journal of an unspectacular and typical part of France. It's a chronicle of the province, of all those who stayed home, of how life there has kept going.
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I left France in 2005 to settle in Germany.
Since then I've been coming back repeatedly to visit this corner of western France where my family is from.
Now living abroad long-term, I'm looking back with the eyes of an almost-foreigner.
In places that feel light-years away from life in Berlin, where mixed feelings at best dominated before I left, I now reconsider what I didn't notice before, what used to annoy me or leave me indifferent.
The act of photographing is, at the very least, showing curiosity. It transcends early perplexity and sharpens one's sense of inquiry.
That initial apathy during early trips was indeed powerful, but what else could I have done?
Over time, photographing became a way to react to the distance, to keep a connection, to bridge two realities of my existence, and to reconsider difficult events in my family's past. It also allowed me to rediscover, sometimes, beauty in the familiar.
~
This very long-term (and still ongoing) project is as much diary as topography. It's a journal of an unspectacular and typical part of France. It's a chronicle of the province, of all those who stayed home, of how life there has kept going.
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