I have had the greatest opportunity in life, and that is to travel. I also have the pleasure of living in another country. I have visited and walked to places that most people will never have the opportunity to experience. 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; 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 pique 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 and 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’Eimendras with my wife and friends. It is outside the village of Le Sappey-en-Chartreuse in the French Alps, outside my home in Grenoble. When I saw this enormous cloud of fog covering the pines in the forest, this one lonely tree, and, being the “street photographer” that I am, I used a wide-angle lens. When I looked through the camera, it was just a little dot, so I had to take off down the hill, thinking that the fog might disappear completely by the time I got there. But I managed to get close enough.

In “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.