I am often stimulated by scenes of daily life which, forty years ago, were my favourite subjects. Today, the urgency is in the transmission of an attitude of reverence towards life and in the re-enchantment of the world.

During my last visit to Venice I went out at dawn one morning to photograph the Grand Canal. As the first gleams of the rising sun illuminated the Ponte dell’Academia, I was amazed to find that a crowd of photographers had already set up tripods and cameras pointing towards the silhouette of the Basilica of Santa Maria del Salute.

I took a shot of the photographers crowded together on the bridge, turned around and disappeared into a narrow street. What was my intention the previous evening when I decided on that dawn visit to the Grand Canal? Was I thinking of Turner’s oil sketches? Was it an unconscious desire to see the architecture of Venice as John Ruskin had seen it in the 19th century? Probably.

In 2014, I was about to start a series of photographs of Hauteville House, where Victor Hugo’s stayed in exile for 15 years. I had the intention, picturing in my mind the dark gothic rooms, to use the legendary black and white 400 Tri-X Kodak film, known for its grainy quality and its rich black tones.
It just happened that around that same period I started looking into the extraordinary colour possibilities offered by digital photography, having considered it for years , I must admit, as very inferior to black and white film.

The introduction I was given to digital colour photography inspired me enough to try and captures as faithfully as I could the colourful atmosphere of my ancestor’s folly on Guernsey and, I am glad I did, as it allowed me to engage into an exploration of colour and texture in a very creative way which I am still pursuing today through other photographic subjects.

Reflecting on my photographic practice during the 70’s and 80’s , I came to realise that the street scenes and instant shots of everyday life, made possible then by the use of high speed films first produced in the 50’s, had been replaced lately by images created with very slow exposures on digital cameras offering extremely sophisticated functions that I have mostly ignored.

Progress in technologies have turned portable telephones into sophisticated cameras enabling the general public to create images with great ease. Millions of images are produced and instantly published on social medias. We are all photographers now.
Short of having a satellite parked on my lawn and being able to make images of subjects out of the reach of the multitude and perhaps more original, it seems that I have adapted to recent mutations in the world of images by turning more often my lens towards the microcosm.