Melos
„We dance on the dust of the dead“ Chateaubriand. This sentence has been echoing in me for a long time. I was born at the seaside, Saint-Malo but it is the Mediterranean and its surroundings that I wanted to explore at the age of man, as if I had the consciousness of belonging to a territory well bigger. My trip started in 2003 and took me to Turkey. Accompanied by René Daligault, my traveling brother and friend writer, we followed in the footsteps of Chateaubriand and it is in Istanbul that we put our bags. That’s where Melos was bornas if we were going to beat the heart of Europe. Here, on the other side of the Balkans, I began to photograph, in black & white and in color, both the present and the traces of the past. Our route then took us west to Plovdiv in Bulgaria and Thessaloniki, Greece. I discovered myself a real photographer with the desire to summon poetry and play with fiction. It is with this alchemy that I began to photograph young people who embody an ephemeral present by comparing them with the traces of a past that constitute them. I like the ruins, the abandoned places and the melancholy that emerges. For me, nostalgia is not a sad feeling. On the contrary, it’s the sound of time, the one I did not know, the one I… My work is inspired by the history of Europe, the literature that tells it and the cinema that transcends it. Melos is a book about sixty photographs taken in Turkey, Bulgaria and Greece between 2006 and 2012 compared with the travel story of writer René Daligault.
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