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I wanted to write a great text about Los Angeles and the whirlwind of emotions that flow in and out of there, but in the end, I decided to talk about myself. That’s all I can do honestly. Otherwise, I feel grandiose, and I don’t like that. Besides, who am I to talk about this strange and sprawling city, the fantasies that come there only to leave broken? Well, it is true that I went there. That’s a good start. I’ve also had my share of illusions and disillusionments. I was convinced that things would turn out differently, something had to have changed since I was there, at that precise moment, believing I wanted again. But deep down I was mostly just floating around, just as I was before, just as I continued to afterwards. And these photographs are not what I thought they would turn out to be. First of all, there should have been more of them, but since I never went back there and had to move on, I had to make do. Then, I was so hell-bent on doing everything on my own that the negatives I developed turned out to be too thin to reproduce the intense contrasts I had initially seen in the darkroom. That being said, I now prefer these shades of grey. They seem a little more faithful to the memories I keep of that period, a sort of bittersweet nostalgia, with the feeling that maybe, I had taken on more than I could handle.


Let’s talk a little bit about these images. They evoke for me a loss of bearings, solitude, the sensation of being both at the center of the world and completely detached from what was happening there … but they also evoke the birth of a new perspective. In any case, these are the things that I encountered along the way, and which deserved closer inspection than what one might have initially assumed.


There are three sound loops that accompany these images. They underline that strange feeling one may have when starting to walk in L.A., and discovering that there are actually two parallel cities, the city of palm trees, cars, beaches and sunglasses, and the city of endless bus journeys, decrepit and abandoned buildings, and drunk homeless people, the only inhabitants of otherwise deserted sidewalks… and one might begin to think that with a little bit of bad luck and a lot of persistence, one could also end up there, sleeping on a bench, half-baked by the sun. Drowned in the vastness of the urban landscape, the power of dreams and images, the feeling of latent collapse and, ultimately, a little lost in L.A.