Françoise Nuñez is a wayfaring photographer of the faraway.
Ethiopia, India, Japan… Her photographs seem to take wing only in this state of weightlessness and opening onto the world afforded by privileged moments in which one is plunged into an everyday life without yet knowing its rules. She has no desire to describe or explore the “exotic” aspects of places she visits; rather, through that immersion in a suddenly estranged life, she wishes to attain a sort of hypersensitive consciousness and to completely devote herself to turning it into images.
If travel is her realm, paradoxically her gaze is essentially intimate, familiar: it possesses the quality of self-effacement and the facility of becoming absorbed by the flux of things as if it were at one with it.
In his preface to Françoise Nuñez’s book on India, Jean-Christophe Bailly tells the following anecdote, which speaks to the deep impression her photographs had made on him. One evening, as he was buying tea from a street vendor in Delhi, he impulsively squatted to drink, like the locals. By way of this gesture, he entered a different space, he became another, a part of the surrounding world.
We have all known these moments of epiphany when we cease to be strangers to the world or when the world freely penetrates us.
That’s what Françoise Nuñez’s photography is like: rather than a decisive moment, it is a free-flowing world that passes through you like a river.
Didier Brousse
