Rectangles

A systematic exercise around Lyon at night.

It is first of all a game of composition, and also a challenge: holding the viewer's gaze. A formal exercise before claiming to have anything to say. Drawing lines, placing blocks within the rectangle of the viewfinder. Already a wish for some distance from the subject, a subject that appears as a stage, a set. Already these lights, these contrasts. Only colour is missing.

This is my first photographic series. To close two years of vocational training at Dominique Sudre's Atelier Magenta, we had to create our first series of images. With no idea of what I wanted to do, I chose a systematic, formal approach: no foreground, contrasting plays of light, frames within the frame. I worked at night, because I felt good there, I think. The tripod let me think: with the camera in my hands, I had too many emotions, too many stray thoughts. The long exposure, beyond the effect, is also a good way to stretch the photographic moment, so pleasant but so fleeting.