His name: Hervé Pezzini. He has just released a book with Snap Collective Publishing with the very nice title: Familiar Unknowns / Inconnus familiers.
He speaks of it thus:
When I started, I was very quickly attracted by the magic of making black and white images, as much by aesthetics as by the slow and meticulous process inherent to laboratory work.
My attraction to street photography, and the people who live there, arose when I discovered large cities like Lyon or Paris and the endless opportunities they offered, especially under the illustrious lenses of Doisneau, Cartier-Bresson, Ronis.
Contacted by the publishing house, I immersed myself in my archives to (re)collect these images, mostly unpublished, and scan films and slides.
I had gone through these contact sheets hundreds of times to find the reference of the negative allowing me to make a large format print or a scan for a publication.
I therefore regularly came across the faces of my loved ones and could measure their evolution over time, not without nostalgia in the face of the relentless passing of days, years. As we continued to share some portions of our respective paths, it was easy for me to reconstruct the story before and after the shooting.
But these photos rub shoulders with others, shots of strangers taken on the spot in the streets of different cities or villages. Here, no path taken in common, not even an encounter; just a painless collision of two instantaneities.
Several decades having passed, some will have disappeared, others will have slowed down their steps or on the contrary will have crossed the border of childhood.
Yet I keep and will only keep from them a tiny and immutable sample of their lives, which I share with you, the reader.
And this collision will have been so fleeting that you hardly have to envy me. You know almost as much, see as much or even more. Your gaze is not biased by the context, by the emotion or the brilliance of the scene. You are simply faced with the result and you can like it or not, tame it or not.
Perhaps, like me, these strangers will become familiar to you.
Herve Pezzini
Order from the author : [email protected]
Link to the publisher : Familiar Unknowns by Hervé Pezzini
