After the season
A Poetic Series in Armor
I dwell in Saint-Malo, Saint-Cast, Saint-Brieuc, Dinard, Dinan…
Names like a litany of shores, towns and seaside havens long cherished for their romance. Songs, postcards, novels, films have all sprung from this stage of the Armor coast in its “high season,” lasting until late September. Over the years, the imagery of the Emerald Coast seems to have drifted into the hands of second‑home dwellers and passing travellers.
But then comes the turning.
The after-season arrives—what we call the “low season.”
And with it, a quieter truth unfolds.
Life, the real one, rises again.
Here, a regional, everyday identity resurfaces: a post‑summer steeped in its own poetry, its humor tinged with fatalism, its Earth‑and‑Sea temperament, its meditative stance, its gentle capacity for wonder. A desire to slow the hours, to notice what usually slips past, to inhabit the in‑between fully—this way of being wholly present to the world that surrounds it.
The “low” season unfurls through its steadfast elements: the sea, the land, the pizza truck glowing at dusk, the gulls circling, the football fields, the artisans at work—interrupted only by sudden, swift, almost miraculous bursts of sunlight. Day after day, labor and its so‑called “peripheral” rhythm stretch between town, countryside, and sea. There is a singular life in Armor.
For this series, as for others, I sought the “low lights,” softening or suspending those that fall from the sky. I felt the light rising from the ground, from the soil itself, as though people here were bound to it, perhaps rooted in this land. I wanted the textures to remain gentle, to recover the smooth, nearly seamless flow of such a daily life.
I wanted form to meet essence.
For me, developing these images is first and foremost an act of memory:
to retrieve the exact atmosphere of the instant when the shutter opened and the world entered.
