Confrontation (1992 - to date.)        

I chose to ride the tiger of an intensive life, across multiple activities, geographies and cultures. For more than 30 years, I have the faced in my photographic projects the absurdity and the dull violence of the postmodern life I have been thrown in.  They stand in the brutalist architectecture and in the urban sprawl of the cities I was living in (Paris, Shanghai) and I visited (New-York, Tokyo Honk-Kong or New-Delhi), in no man’s lands, and  in the symbolic figure of the Passerby. How to find one’s place and meaning in such deshumanized and desacralized environments? As a result of what, prevails a sense of seclusion and anonymity among a stream of passers-by, guided towards who knows what, captured by an imperceptible yet strict control.


Brutalism


Concrete concrete concrete concrete
Concrete concrete concrete concrete
Concrete concrete concrete concrete
Concrete concrete concrete concrete


Cubic monolithic atonal standardized
Monolithic atonal standardized cubic
Stantardized atonal monolithic cubic
Atonal monolithic standardized cubic









Which tiger to ride?
In this city
There are only cats
With dull fur
And incredulous looks
Lost in hypnosis
Mirror buildings













Lost in the mist
The docks anesthetized by the night follow their own trail
The snow falls from weariness
In white and obese smoke.
We walk along the brick factories
The gates, the blast furnaces
The curved highway
The symbols and false lights
A flight in a single direction
Flows, cadences
Nobody.

.








Next Exit
5km
No exit
Night out of focus
Around the ring
Endless











The steps do not wear out
Do not transmit by their patient patina
The burdens and the joys
The dreams and the tears

















Colours have not yet been invented
Only shadow
Brings some cheerfulness
An atonal life
Without nuance 
















The light struggles to make its way
Yet the grass grows
And lets a noise filter through
Sometimes 















The nights let the winter pass 
The bridges planted with solitary trees
 Pass by,
Over there.























Our dreams
Shadowplays
Breathed by a sun
 At the fading noon








































High Voltage Lines
So Many Hopes
Anesthetized 
By the Parallel Mist
On the Horizon
Without Ever
 ReachingThe Sun








Take a road at random
 As long as it doesn't look like anything
 Empty of houses, sad crossroads,
 Dull and wild grass
 Forgotten by the green
 Just a passage
Blowing dust, left to trucks only
 From time to time walls, rubbish
 Memory of an escape, of an exile
 Noise for only presence
 Alternate movements of light
 The sky is too white
 Perspectives
 Interchanges so far away
 An evasive passer-by
On a bridge
Someone at last? 
Our reflections
 In the black water of the canals












Hope



There was in the blue of the sky
A fragment of this dream
That I never dared
To fly 



 









In My Solitude





Alone on the threshold of a dreamless night
Dreaming of the perfect outline
Of an unknown circle
I have lived













I walked in the night
Not of the step of Man
The one that comes
Approaches
Lifts
Ascents 
Precise trajectory
 That in the end leads to the grave
I walked in the night with the only meaningful step; 
Limping at the breaks of the light
Inhaling the first rays of day
The step of the gaze carries within it what life carries away
Free to love and to forget
Drunk with envy.












































My shadow
Hugs the blades of grass
 Scrapes the hoarse granularity of the wall 
Runs out of breath under the clouds
 Dissolves into the night















Passers-by

Nowhere to move out
Nowhere to hang out
No alpha no omega
Spiralling in meaningless circles
Ringing loudness bells
Of solitude and haggard rushes
We are passers-by.

Thrown on a nearby pavement
Under clothless lights
We grip rusty rails and fallen ideas
And breathe fresh air in consumerism
Our fulfilment lies in concrete
Our love in mirrors
We seek forgiveness in speed
and sins in cans.
We are all passers-by.  

The white shirts shed a misleading light
The night looks as bright as the day
Shadows cross fearless
The old order is broken
Who keeps the sacred fire and the dream burning?

Blinded by a dust of power
Bonded by agreed mistakes
It’s hard to swim against the flow
Even to look back to the source
Alone
And we stand homeless in our crowdy dwellings.  

O Passer-by
Look out at the cloud
And tell the Street we lie here
Obedient to its words


(All the poems except “Passers-by” translated from French by the Author)











From series done between 1992 and 2016, in New-York, Paris, Shanghai and in China.