1. Dry

About streams running dry, photography, intimacy and newsletters

I stopped investing myself in photography in 2017, when we moved from our old apartment to our house. I sort of know why, but it doesn’t change the fact it was like a stream running dry, and it was the first time happened to me in the fifteen years I spent intensely looking for something through practicing photography everyday. It was actually time for a pause, and I accepted it because with more ease because I had other fulfilling creative and professional activities that I knew at the time could profit from more investment from myself.

Then it came back all of a sudden during last winter, and I have to say it didn’t come back the way it was before. I had to relearn almost everything and at every step I discovered I didn’t want to to things exactly the way I used to. I’m still in that phase and I’ll speak about it more in details eventually, but the fact is: I started taking photographs at every opportunity again, the way I used to for years. Especially when we go to the countryside, on a hidden hill that’s thirty minutes drive from our house, in the small town where we live in the south of France.

These photos were taken the 20th of august, I began to write this post a few days later, but I’m posting it only now. Even though I have taken many more photographs since, it’s relevant to me because these photos are tied to what I wanted to say as a first post of my newsletter.

With my partner Christine and our two children, we spent two days at a friend’s house on the hill in this late august. I was surprised to see how dry the trees were, it was like witnessing an early autumn right in the middle of august. I’m not sure I have ever seen the hills in this state ever before.

The oaks had an orange hue that is not even their normal tint when autumn comes. Some looked like a burning bush. Other areas seemed less impacted.

I have spent the second part of the summer with some difficulty walking because of a broken toe, I was pretty excited to spend time on the hill with my kids and being able to walk again in nature.

Right in the middle of the dry hills, runs the river Lot, and there we found a break from the heat, in the water below the Cénevières castle.

These are some of the photos I took there and, Christine, who is a filmmaker, chose the last three as a reference for a film she’s currently writing. She asked me to take photos of our son Antonin in a costume that was made by our friend Béatrice for her new project. Here’s one.

I’ve never felt completely confortable about posting photos of my loved ones on social media. I’m one of the many photographers who feel social media have greatly disturbed the process of photographers whose main subject was their daily intimate life or their family, and that’s partly what I’ve been doing for years.

I love the fact a newsletter feels a bit more like writing a letter to friends, directly delivered to the inbox, without algorithm or hashtags messing with the process.

I hope you’ll like what I’ll show and tell on here. Next time, I’ll tell you why I write in English, even though I am french and live and work in France.

Thanks for reading and please share and subscribe if you haven’t already.

À bientôt !

Alain