Corons

My photographs have always been the result of my encounters with the world. 

Living and photography blend together, intertwine, and enrich one another in a parallel quest—beyond words, yet always shared. Very often, I find in dialogue with others the conditions for artistic and cultural fusion, as well as the culmination of a creative process that might otherwise have been hindered by the photographer’s almost natural solitude.

I extract fragments of lives to present them, share them, give them meaning, and explain them. This complex visual exploration, which leads to the project’s completion, can be facilitated by an in-depth exploration of the region. The goal is to create a resonance between my life and a place through the medium of photography.

My lives as a teacher and a photographer have been intimately intertwined for decades, and rediscovering black-and-white negatives while moving house has brought back to life all those fragments of lived reality that had been buried deep within my memory…

I was born in the Hauts-de-France coal-mining region, where I spent my entire childhood, with a father who worked as a mine surveyor and a mother who ran a shop. I’m married to the daughter of a miner and am the father of two daughters who loved discovering and living in their grandparents’ mining village. I was a teacher—“elementary school teacher”—in Rouvroy and Drocourt; I spent my time in the mining villages, where my students lived, and I took photographs there for several years during the 1970s.