I have had the greatest opportunity in life and that is to travel. I have also have the pleasure of living in another country. I have visited and walked to places that most people will never have the opportunity of experiencing. I am not just a street photographer, I am a documentarian. I was born to document life as I see it, as it unfurls before me. Whether I am on the streets or in the mountains, I document in the same way, with the same camera and the same lens. Whether up close and in your face or far from the streets, my approach is the same. Whether it be traveling to the streets of Paris, Venice or Toulon or hiking to the Lacs de Fenêtre in Orsières, Suisse, around the Presqu’île de Crozon in Bretagne or to the Grand Paradiso in the Vallée d’Aoste, Italia or just moseying around in Grenoble.
Every time I leave my apartment, I see things that peak my curiosity. I am not just about the standard street photography. I see amazing things, beautiful things, bewildering things, things I never dreamed of seeing when I was a younger man.
I started taking landscapes and architecture in the 1980s in California but I didn’t have the same mindset or appreciation to fully understand or comprehend what I was seeing. When walking around town, I wonder why some of the street artists out there do what they do, where they do it. Do they really know how beautiful it is? When you disassociate the subject from the reality does it then become art? Like in the photograph “Virginie, Grenoble 2020”, did the artist really see the wall? The cracks in the wall? The bricks in the wall? The color of the wall? I’m not sure they took all of that into account, but I did. Or in “A Broken Heart, Grenoble 2016” This is the trim on a building and I can’t imagine what it took to carve these little gems but I remember thinking about how this one little heart came to be broken.
In the photograph, “Tree L’Eimendras 2, 2018”, I was snowshoeing at the Col de l’Émeindras with my wife and friends. It is outside of the village of Le Sappey-en-Chartreuse in the French Alps, outside of my home in Grenoble. when I saw this enormous cloud of fog covering the pines in the forest and this one lonely tree and me being the “street photographer” that I am, I use a wide angle lens and when I looked through the camera it was just a little dot, so I had to just take off down the hill thinking that the fog might disappear completely by the time I get there, but I managed to get close enough. In the “36 Lacs de Fenêtre, Orsières, Suisse 2016” We sometimes leave on a hike very early in the morning. I always love how the sun comes up over the mountains. The Swiss Alps are immense, green and always snow capped as seen here on this beautiful August day. The enormity of the space can be seen in relation to the farm in the lower center of the photograph.
I have visited and hiked to a lot of places in my life, places that I may never return to as I begin to age. I am glad to have documented the beauty and wonderment of this land.