PARAGES

Series of 200 analogue photographs

Begun in the early 1980s, Parages brings together nearly two hundred analogue photographs taken in France and abroad.
Rather than an inventory of places, the series forms a sensitive journey through urban, suburban, and marginal territories observed over years of travel, wandering, and displacement.

Harbor zones, wastelands, deserted roads, anonymous architectures, outskirts, vacant lots, façades, power lines, isolated constructions, and landscapes suspended in waiting compose a fragmented geography in which human presence seems to have disappeared while remaining perceptible everywhere.

People are absent from the images, yet their traces persist continuously: in built structures, in the organization of space, in worn surfaces, in signs of occupation or abandonment. These landscapes become indirect portraits — spaces inhabited by a silent memory.

The series unfolds without strict documentary logic. The photographs are connected through tensions of light, relationships of form, architectural rhythms, and sensations of solitude and suspension. Between realism and abstraction, certain places appear almost unreal, as though they belonged more to a mental cartography than to an identifiable geography.

The analogue process itself is inseparable from this relationship to time. Grain, texture, contrasts, and accidents of light inscribe the images within a slow and attentive temporality, where landscape becomes less a setting than a perceptual state.

The title Parages evokes precisely this notion of neighboring, uncertain, shifting space: territories situated at the margins of the center, but also mental, emotional, and memorial zones.

Conceived as a way of bringing nearly twenty years of photographic work to a close, Parages was published by Éditions Cent Pages in 2008.
The book gathers these scattered landscapes into a continuous drift, without explicit narrative, where each image seems to extend the previous one within the same experience of movement, absence, and looking.