Something occurs, a dark dazzle, a violent sensuality, a restlessness, a possession, a scar… A flash lightning then back to the fiction of smooth childhood. You were these distortions which are now immobilized. You no longer will. Captured moments, dead once taken. That of you disappears.
Something obvious arises from in between the breaches : in the very depth of your body, you know it. You know that between you and us there is barbed time. You know that you will have to go through it, or, to be more precise, that you will eventually need to have gone through it. You don’t know how, by what violation, what dismemberment, what jolts. You don’t know in which stretch of space and time this is going to happen, but you know that once you will have reached the side we’re on, something will be dead. You will have partly completely disappeared.
This series is part of a work that has begun four years ago, though some older pictures did naturally find their way into its body.
It originates in two photographs, one of my daughter and one of my son, that were taken in everyday moments of my family life. They have revealed to me something that has profoundly shaken me. They opened up territories, far from the clichés of childhood, that seemed to me impossible not to explore. Since then I haven’t stopped waiting for these moments of revelation and poetry, watching out for them or bringing them about, though without directing them. These are the moments when, for a tiny second, the kids are no longer my children but are persons in their own right and freedom, whom I look at with a stunned, moved, troubled, worried and fascinated gaze.
Other people too did recognise something intimate and buried in these images. I have sought this very reality that we know exist, but which we prefer to steer clear of : the power that’s hidden inside of them and us, cracks, aggressiveness, sexuality, impulses…, keeping away from obscenity and sentimentality.
