Photo series - "Just a focus" (English version)

This series of images dates from 2013. While I was walking through the streets of Angers with @oreille-pointue (at the time she was studying landscape engineering), I tried to answer the photographic subject that I had been given before the holidays and which was supposed to deal with the theme "the right distance". In search of the slightest inspiration, I then looked around me and began to observe the crowd, coming and going in the city, busy with various things, seeming at the same time disconnected from the world around them. I then wondered how one could make contact without ever communicating with these people, these complete strangers. At that moment, the street became my setting, the stage where the actors were the passers-by, my friend and myself...

Armed with my Reflex, not really discreet, I took my courage with both hands and embarked on this adventure. During this work, an adrenaline rush overwhelmed me, because I felt that a voyeuristic relationship was developing in a certain way between me and the passer-by. Indeed, I chose to work with a fixed focal length of 50mm, which forced me to get closer to my subject, to stay at the heart of the environment that I wanted to immortalize.

The choice to process my photos in black and white was the obvious choice for a better reading of the series, because the colors were too different on each of them to be able to create a unit. In addition, my view of street photography has been shaped mostly in black and white, after having discovered and appreciated references in this field such as Cartier-Bresson, Doisneau, Vivian Maier and Elliott Erwitt, to name but a few.

For my part,"the right distance" in an urban environment is to manage to capture a scene of life thanks to a look at the other in a photographic process without the latter being consciously involved and without this causing a real change in his activity of the moment by crossing people's gaze only through the lens.

As far as the protocol of my series is concerned, I took my photographs in landscape format, which allowed me not to isolate or put forward an element, but on the contrary to include the whole environment where passers-by were, even if in the end, one can say that there are portraits.

I then placed my friend on one side of the image for each scene I wanted to photograph so that they would appear in the foreground, blurredly, as if she had not been invited to be on the image. This is something you can think of if you only see a separate image of the series. To say that the photo is missed because someone passed in front of it at the time of the shooting.

That's how my show works. When you look at this last one as a whole, you understand that there is a part of premeditation and staging in my photos, that not everything is so natural and spontaneous. Nevertheless, despite the recurrence of this fuzzy character, we quickly realized that what mattered to me in my shots were the people in the background, who at the time of the trigger seemed intrigued, vulnerable and seemed to suddenly become aware of themselves within this environment teeming with other similar people, facing the eye of the objective.

Through this stratagem, I captured in each of their eyes a moment of questioning, doubt, surprise, even anger. Everyone can interpret these looks in their own way, but that's where it finds the naturalness in my photos, and my distance from them meant that none of their action was really altered by the camera, because their glance only lasted a second.

The last photograph of the series is rather paradoxical in comparison to the others but shows an unfailing intensity of action in the subjects photographed. We find a game of glances, but that they share only among themselves and which nevertheless reaches us as spectators of the scene, at least me, for my part, that's what I felt. This scene of life is understood by the exchange of their mutual contemplation and indifference to what is around them.

My series consisted of capturing an evocative moment, revealing a truth, interpreting a face on a precise moment. No photograph can fully capture the complexity of a person, but this representation can show an aspect of a person at some point in time. Quite often, everything is in the eyes. When the subject makes eye contact with the lens, his intensity is as strong with the person looking at the photo as it was with the photographer.

The right distance was therefore to create a scenaristic aspect where the artificial is not necessarily where we think it is, a device that allowed to preserve the naturalness of the background while including a staging in the foreground. Mixture of two facets of photography, between a snapshot and a studied pose, just a focus, between blur and reality.