I have constructed this book as a kind of promenade, a walk through the towns that I have explored – through a particular world. I wanted it to be a journey in which the images, with no other information but their presence, articulate a visual world they way a piece music sets our bodies in motion by its composition. The echoes that I’ve tried to create between images expresses a vision of our age, a relation to the world and, above all, the idea that encounter is in essence a way of imparting movement to the world.

The city is a receptacle, the crucible of an alchemy between infinitely diverse bodies, as they move, interact and influence each other and are transformed, bringing forth the living body of the city itself.

My passion for understanding life processes led me first to the study of sociology and ethnology, and from there I moved on to photography, not as a consciously artistic act, but out of the need to understand the connections over a very wide range of human behaviour, and the phenomenological realities of social life. To me, photography seemed more open than an ethnographic approach, based as it is on the simple act of being there and looking, without the utilitarian expectations of science, the presuppositions of meaning. Gradually, the images I made in the different cities came together in the anonymity of the other images and, finally, re-presented the city that is within me: my city.

My city is a popular city. The men and women I work with are conscious and proud of belonging to that collective social body we call “the people.” This is primarily a cultural matter. It represents a certain ethos, an idea of dignity. But today this social body is dying out. In my work I call its last survivors “The Personages.” I photograph the people I meet and who talk to me. They have a way of talking, they know how to say what they don’t want. They know that the world is mad and that you’d have to be mad oneself to function at its centre. Some of them are as busy as ministers, but they’re not and have no wish to be. Others love emptiness, contemplation, things our society leaves little room for. And so they take paths that are often hard and twisting in order to both survive and be free. These “personages” are growing rare, they count for less and less. In my way, I accompany this process.

Every urban particularity has helped form my vision of the Western city. Marseille, for example, helped me construct “The Personages.” It is a place in whose centre the people’s body is still present and active. Its empty spaces and architectural masses accompanied my questions about the capacity of photography to translate the power of their respective bodies. It’s a matter of finding the right distance, a sensitive “touch” that goes beyond reading what is visible. Can empathy translate into a photograph? That is the key question.

Unlike the hanging of my exhibitions, for this book I have chosen to put together the images of the cities I have explored, and to reveal their identity. But the succession of images and places is not chronological. Transitions are never made explicit; rather, a simple shift makes us aware that we have gone from one city to another, even before we get our bearings and begin to recognise the places.

I need the physical dimension of experience. I like getting viewers to see the image “with their guts.” I feel a basic need to go beyond the common understanding of the world, its frozen mental representation, in order to get it moving again. That is what has determined everything I do, and my way of using the tool that is photography.

In all my actions, I like to question meaning by dialogues between bodies, between a human body and a construction, between one image and another, between the body of the beholder and the photographic body. This unstable in-between refuses affirmation, the definitive state of affairs. Together, the images continuously replay the meaning that they carry within them when they meet, questioning the place that they inhabit. This term “inhabit” is vital, for it holds within itself all the necessary physical conditions of an experience of space.

But how, then, does one inhabit a book, that multitude of pages that we turn, thereby creating so many ruptures between the images? The in-between of things is something that a book makes it physically difficult to conceive.

And yet, today, I feel the need for a book that will reflect the true nature of images, so that they can be seen in and for themselves. I have constructed different kinds of images, like a photographic lexicon that can be used to compose multiple sentences. Each of these images is conceived in order to counter a purpose that is imposed by photography itself. Paradoxically, this way of composing in opposition to optical rules is possible only with a large view camera, which is ontologically tied up with perspective. This is what re-establishes a representation that is as singular as my perception of the world.
Since 2001, the experience of film has taken me towards another kind of image, other kinds of space-time. In cinema, it is editing that embodies this need to “make” the image. I love working with the image as a material.

In the age of the homogenous acceleration of time, I like to work in this zone between photography and cinema, inventing dialogues and trying out other kinds of space. In this new practice, I feel the need to maintain the time of the photographic image, with its before and after, with what is invisible and absent.
Münster Lands, my latest film, shows the Personages crossing the frame, shot by shot. The simple presence of bodies provides infinite ways of modifying our perception of space or the identity of place. Ultimately, what we have here are images that address sculptural questions, as is the case in all my work.

Between photography and film, my intention now is to enter other territories, but also other cultures. Cultures that have invented their own idea of the city, their own way of imagining communal life, before they were forced to comply with Western logics of urbanisation.