Explore. Cross. Scrutinize worlds far removed from my own. 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 been exploring the body for 20 years and co-directing films that straddle the line between portraiture and collective fresco. Over time and through filming, without really knowing how or why, I started 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 power that a single image can sometimes convey, even though my job is to produce them by thousands. What started out as a sporadic pursuit gradually turned into an obsession, and I inevitably succumbed to the frenzy of collecting (Leica, Nikon, Hasselblad, Pentax, etc.), swearing with each camera I found that it would be my last. Until the next one.

This photographic practice, self-taught and intuitive, developed as a counterpoint to my documentary work, offering 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 to photograph my children and my dog, I like to gently mock tourists and their attire, I like mist on windows, fog and puddles. All these images form an intimate body of work combining documentary, abstraction, melancholy and comical strangeness.

For years, I accumulated these images the way one accumulates memories, thousands of pictures 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.