Grâce à Elle

This book, the most important for me and the result of a year of work, is a poetic inventory in homage to my mother. Jeanne was born in 1922 and died in 2020. The day after her death, I set myself this task: to pay tribute to her so as not to bury her forever. So began a long process of trying to photograph her funeral. Then I went to dig through my family’s photographic archives: stacks of boxes filled with carefully dated and filed slides, yellowed envelopes full of prints of France in the time of President Albert Lebrun.

Grâce à Elle is a family history from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present day, a collection of tenderness, a sentimental parade. This work has imposed itself as an extension of the past, a romance of which I was one of the residents for nearly fifty years. Does visual memory still have a place in our society of immediacy? What will remain of our memories when our thousands of photos are forgotten or lost in the cloud? The transmission of images is an important step if we want the memory to be more than just a forgotten past. I wanted to create an intimate book in a small format, whose 192 pages bring together images from the family archives taken by my father and grandfather, as well as photographs that I took in the family apartment, like a poetic inventory.