In search of the past time
This series of 15 photographs was taken in a single room in the family home before it was demolished. Some time before the demolition site started, it seemed important to me to fix on film the last images of this place whose shutters had been closed for very long years and where my ancestors lived before leaving me.
So it was with great emotion that I pushed the door open to find all these familiar objects that I had known and that were still there, intact as if they were waiting for me.
I flipped through my mother’s notebooks again when she was 11 in 1936. I saw the pram she had grown up in again and I was able to chat with all her dolls, then I cried to the tunes of music that I had not forgotten and I saw the phone that never worked.
My emotion was so strong that I spent hours dreaming in this room, only to come out after my duty as a photographer was done. But before closing this door forever, the image of this ancestor suddenly appeared in the mirror of his dresser as if to come and say THANK YOU for coming by.
Bernard Moncet
