Series title: The curtains fall
Year of the series: 2013-2016
This series was made at "la belle de Mai" district of the 3rd arrondissement of Marseille.
It has long been the seat of the Marseilles tobacco factory and the place of emigrants. It was an exclusively working-class neighborhood. Today, it is sensitive and lively, endemic (30%), despite the presence of numerous businesses.
Before I found myself face to face with my models, I penetrated dark stairwells with peeling paintings, stirring raw steps, or electric cables intermingling creating a strange climate. Time seems to have stopped there.
By entering the antiquated aspect of the places, the smells, the light project me in my childhood as if I visited my grandparents. Here nothing has changed for decades. Death has already passed by, taking one of the two spouses. Through the medium of photography I grasp the reality of an era that is going away, transfigured by my imagination.
Beyond the old-fashioned aspect of most interiors, it is the paradoxes that strike the most. In these people at the end of life, the symbols expected from the sacred are opposed to objects more incongruous, even infantilising.
Weakened but worthy. Fragile and revolted. Lost in the middle of their landmarks, the subjects expose themselves with modesty.
Each photograph exposes a closed, open universe to a hypothetical other. The spectator invites himself to these people and feels the familiarity of places; It is capable of detecting the weight of an ever more disembodied daily.
The colors also differ: sombre in some, sepulchral white in others, exuberance is opposed to sobriety. The bodies, deformed by old age, denied by clothes favoring comfort to aesthetics, tell of the past years.
Each interior turns out to be a refuge celebrating the disappeared person, past happy moments, a physical and mental adaptation to an environment created from scratch.
The eyes fixed by the photograph still sparkle but life seems to run too fast today.
"Death seems much less terrible, when one is tired" Simone de Beauvoir.
The curtains fall slowly but inevitably.