I was extremely fortunate to be confined to a beach house in Brazil. This allowed me to witness not only the health crisis, but also an even more devastating environmental crisis: climate change. This latter crisis became apparent to me daily through the disappearance of my beach, through the slow retreat of this incredibly diverse coastal strip. Humans are wielding the sea against the land; they are contributing to the rising sea levels that are eroding it. This coastline, this strange foreshore, this last frontier, is advancing inexorably.

Every week, sometimes every day, I would discover one or more palm trees on our beach, their lives cut short. I witnessed the slow death of these vibrant totems which, just moments before, had dusted the overseas sky, carried by the mischievous trade winds. A tree stopped in its natural stride towards the zenith, the air, and the sun. A tree that passes from a vibrant, noisy verticality to a silent, deathly horizontality, after a slow uprooting. How can one not see in this a metaphor for our human condition? For a few months, I photographed my confined horizon, a thin strip of sand a few kilometers long, bordered by two estuaries and a palm grove. This marine cemetery, open to sky, land, and sea. The final encounter between nature and its elements.

The photos are organized into five series, in a temporal progression from Lives to Lives, then Fall, Uprooting, Lying Down, and finally Buried in the Sand.
    Lives to Lives represents the confrontation between land and sea, the shadow cast by the tree on the ocean.
    Fall: the palm tree abandons its vibrant, living verticality.
    Uprooting: the loss of connection to the nourishing earth.
    Lying Down: the beginning of a silent, deathly horizontality.
    Buried in the Sand: finally, the burial, the disappearance of these living totems.

How can we not see metaphors for our human condition! Enjoy the journey!

I have chosen to seek balance and geometric rigor in my sketched images. I like to carefully craft my compositions, to structure the image. Nothing should be superfluous; everything must be refined to convey a minimalist perspective. The image should thus border on abstraction, on the timeless. I love the emptiness of spaces, the feeling of solitude and gentle stillness, which make the invisible visible.

I am a surveyor, a photographer in motion. I work with a digital camera with a fixed focal length, a wide-angle lens to immerse myself in the landscape, or to highlight a foreground, without a tripod, to gain spontaneity, as well as with a drone in a vertical view to explore the third dimension of these scenes.