I have always traveled a lot around the world. But in the last dozen years or so, no more as a
tourist or explorer; I’ve instead traveled in the hopes of capturing and representing with my
camera the essence of the places I visited.
To this end, I’ve traveled through the Orient quite a lot, in search of the spirit of those places in
their past. The Orient, so to speak, as categories of spirit: a bit like those 19-th century peintres
voyageurs on their trips to Palestine, Maghreb or Far East. I sought out proof of times past in the
cities I visited, and I tried to represent their atmosphere, their essence. I was inspired by the
Orientalist painters’ watercolors, where color envelops everything in a nuanced way with no
clear transition, as if passing through a thin veil. I tried to seize the truth of a place through
abstraction, trying to transform its image into an archetypal representation.
