These images come from the time when I used to live in the rue Marie Benoist, by the Place de la Nation. Oftentimes, I wandered around the neighborhoods with my cameras just looking for something that would provoke my thoughts. Upon finding something, anything, I would simply take a picture, maybe more, and then I would stop and start writing. It was all about what Ansel Adams used to call visualization, that is, the abstract and subjective representation of what you had just registered by the unstable means of light, and film, and lenses. How wonderful was that experience of shooting and writing, at the time in which digital cameras either didn’t exist or were too expensive for me to afford. One of the charms of film is that you have to wait until the film has been developed; in the meantime, the image grows different in you, as a result of ‘visualization’, having, hence, forgotten about the precise elements of the original, fugitive image from ‘reality’. On the other hand, what kind of visualization can grow up while shooting against the wall, even if you have les yeux fertiles? One in which the History of Art is a labyrinth of streets with narrow pavements; in them, Art is asking questions to pedestrians whose better answer is “Sorry, not today”.
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