Francis Besson - OCEAN IMMEDIAT

Prélude

An upright chair. It is waiting but without hope. A sea responding to the caress of the wind, a grass sea at the foot of the lighthouse. A mooring man is dancing in the forlorn wintry night.

It is a knot in a rope which fastens a phantasm or a dream. The ship has sailed off. Or, perhaps, it has found shelter under the surface of unknown things. We are in an undefined zone between land and sea, fearing to move on to the end of the waters, but impossible to resist its force.

For this is the adventure of someone who lives on our earth. A photographer who believes what he sees and sometimes, after reflection, that which he has imagined. An earth dweller wearing spectacles, less of an old salt but rather someone truly curious.

He has travelled down the gravel paths of the desert, climbed the Altiplano, visited aboriginal peoples. Seen faces large and small and of all colours. A man of our earth, who in his travels, has found himself confronted with a physical limit which is also, at least a little, his own physical limit. That of the end of the land, which abandons itself to the fearful ocean. The ocean at its furthest borders, way up in the north.

These regions are, first and foremost, inhuman. They are harsh, stubborn, beyond description and totally devoid of compassion. All the elements there which have the quality to inspire the conquering human spirit. Man is present and very much present. His imagination permeates rising up into the level of sagas and other myths and legends. The photographer lets them drift in the background. But brings out the harshness, the broken and abandoned, the carcass and the shipwreck, the junkyards and the cemeteries.

Evidently, you think you can taste the salt. But it is the salty taste of men stubbornly hard-working and simply stubbornly hard. Of gests embodied in wood, in rope or stone and that time has made forgotten after only two seasons. Of century-old crafts and thousand year-old beacons. Of traces of daily life which, anywhere else, would appear to be an exaggeration.

He is there and photographs this exaggeration, that state of declination in visions that are clear and truthful, never forcing, never easy. He brings back to us some of that exaggeration. An obsession for him, an obsession for us.

For the photographer, for my father
Pierre-François Besson