They remain

"Where do our fathers come from? Who are they? What do they pass on? And What are the sons waiting for? " are the questions that Eric Courtet asks. The unsaid mark our lives most often, and we deal with it, rebuilding our own history and those of our elders. It is this silence which is underlined here with these portraits of fathers and sons together, of all ages, a “stop on image" which can trigger a narration for the viewer, in territory intimate — another truth. Beyond the similarities (or lack thereof) between the subjects, it is above all the eye contact, the postures and the gestures that strike. Tenderness or hardness, modesty, embarrassment or affection, complicity or shyness, discomfort… these feelings, in which the decor and the outfits participate, are not given from the outset but evoked by the off-screen, the beyond of the image. Behind the apparent frontality, even though the subjects are from behind, it is an approach fragile of all the possible knots, all the secrets that connect fathers and the wires; possible or rejected transmissions, professional or all kinds (taste for a sport, music, nature, etc.) — in a word: the roots, which we are invited to question, between past and future, because they remain, the fathers, the sons. The roots or the sources… Marie-Hélène Lafon, whose obsession is well-known in his books for the tearing away and the attachment to a childhood land, has slipped between these images to offer its own narration, its own reading silences. In small blocks of dense prose (and two poems), she gives back the sons speak, and it doesn't matter whether we can find this or that element of the images in these texts, they do not make captions because what we hear it is a voice, where feelings and sensations always surface paradoxical — human. Offering a memory to these sons, she invites us to her tour, with Éric Courtet, to question ours, to look at these faces, these attitudes in the light of our own history, in echo. To read the fragility of genealogies and filiations, like, trees, "[the] skin, [the] grain, [the] velvet. [The] silence.