Archives – May 21, 2013
Old farmers, agricultural workers in their interiors, their “main room,” the only living space.
Witnesses to an ageing generation, but also to another relationship with photography: more posed, less common. Witnesses to a 20th-century countryside, to a simple life, local, neighborly, even self-sufficient.
Women in smocks, coffee, calvados, heating by stove or wood-burning range, the oilcloth, men in caps, women with glasses, simple people, people of modest means.
These people are the customers of my fruit and vegetable rounds, who have trusted me for 20 years now, and who also make my living possible.
These people are extraordinary. In the photographs, they do not force anything; they simply pose, one shutter release and no more, out of respect, so as not to take advantage.
I love what I do: making people happy, giving happiness, bringing to life these moments that are, for me, privileges.
Pascal Lecoeur is an itinerant merchant. He travels through the Normandy countryside to sell his vegetables to those who cannot get around.
Every month, he visits more than two hundred people, and uses these moments of pause to take a few photographs.
His favorite customers are “ordinary people no one talks about, whom we do not see, whom we do not hear either, simple people who have worked all their lives to receive a small pension.”
Pascal Lecoeur
