The Familiar series is a body of work that approaches everything that is familiar to the photographer, who tries to maintain his naïve fascination and the delight he still experiences while documenting what he finds exotic during his work as a travel photographer. The series is made of portraits, candid moments and familiar scenes and still-lives. It experiments the thin line between fiction and document by using poetry in a domestic universe.
Essay
“We recognize – or think we recognize – everything: situations, landscapes, people, who could be neighbors, friends, even family members. Nothing spectacular, but a gentle strangeness, attention paid to tiny details, moments suspended in time, variations in light when it becomes magical and surrounds everything with a familiar halo of unreality. Both realistic and mysterious, inexplicable and yet close, this universe is constructed pictorially – before devoting himself to photography, this artist was a painter – around colors that with the greatest prudence avoid describing, all the better to make themselves felt. The eye, never feeling attacked, plunges into an atmosphere devoid of roughness, there in a complete serenity to move about from detail to detail, to a pose, a moment of abandon,, an acceptance, the fullness of a landscape, the fluidity of the sky when it meets the sea, the supple elegance of an interior that has become a still life. Close to us, close to our homes, should we decide to look at them, here is a succession of moments of light that exalt the beauty of the world and decline emotions.”
Christian Caujolle, Paris Photo, Nov. 2013