Seeing without being seen, protected by the camera. Spying on other people's lives and navigating the heart of their intimacy. As a documentary filmmaker, I have moved through worlds far removed from my own. Over the course of my shoots, I began taking photos, initially borrowing my wife's film camera, a 1981 Olympus OM-1. The element of chance and the letting go that such an old camera requires are unmatched and part of the thrill. That was in 2010, and I was immediately struck by the evocative power that a single image can sometimes convey, I, whose job is on the contrary to produce them by thousands. Long sporadic, this practice gradually turned into an obsession, and I inevitably succumbed to the frenzy of collecting (Leica, Nikon, Hasselblad, Pentax, etc.), swearing each time that the next camera would be my last. Until the next one.

This photographic practice, self-taught and intuitive, has developed as a counterpoint to my documentary work, with greater agility, autonomy, and immediacy: photographing what I cannot film. Whether posed portraits or street scenes, everyday images or distant travels, my photographs share a common thread: documenting reality while submitting to its demands. I am not looking for the spectacular or the staged. I pursue emptiness, nothingness, boredom, the strange, or the ordinary. In this ongoing exploration, everything interests me as long as it feels true and the distance is right. I like abandoned cars, plastic chairs and stacked crates. I like portraits of strangers and that tacit agreement between the observer and the observed. I like photographing my children, I like to gently mock tourists and their attire. I like mist on windows, fog and puddles. All these pictures form an intimate body of work combining documentary, abstraction, melancholy and comical images.

For years, I accumulated these pictures the way one accumulates memories, thousands of shots posted furtively on Instagram before disappearing into the depths of poorly labeled, often misplaced hard drives.

Today, I want these photographs to exist. And it starts here.