www.belegou.org // mobiles area
skipping school to go for whole days wandering and photographing the port of Le Havre and those were my landscapes.
Le Havre where I went to high school then. Le Havre, like Lorient or Brest, Brest, where my father had done his apprenticeship as a boilermaker at the arsenal, before returning to the railways at the liberation, was one of those cities razed to the ground by the Allies at the end of the Second World War. Although the reconstruction was of better quality than in Lorient or Brest, it is a cold city without any charm or interest. It is only an industrial city and a port.
At the time, the world was not as locked down as it later became, one could come and go in the port with the most complete freedom in the world. In addition, the workforce and the movements of ships, cargo ships and liners were still abundant.
It was my space of freedom. For high school, I had finally found a system of formidable efficiency. I had stolen a pile of tickets for the entrance to class, which were generously stamped and signed in advance, I just had to write my name on them, the date and the time. As I write this, the connection is imposed on me with the landscapes of the Chimera cycle that I am making.
I find the same freedom in these recent shots in the forests, near the ponds, the river, on the seaside. And perhaps the same, if not rebellion, at least the same breath of oxygen and freedom necessary for survival after painful ordeals.
I was still thinking about this: the refuge in the imagination from childhood, common to many artists who have experienced trauma in their childhood. The images, the writing, the music. And the first photographs: those that decorated the train compartments, those that my father made, with great talent, when we went on holiday as a family.
Chimeras, everyday landscapes, everything upside down and against the landscape photographs of travel agencies and magazines...
