Comme vous, je les découvre. Et je ne veux pas fermer les yeux, les oublier.

I’m not used to taking photos like this. Stealing images. I don’t often do street photography when it comes to taking pictures of people, of passers-by. Here, the approach is all the more disturbing because these are people slumped over, asleep, collapsed on themselves, right there on the sidewalks. They had no say in the matter; I didn’t meet them in the sense that our eyes didn’t meet, and I certainly didn’t speak to them. I know nothing about them. I saw them as I wandered around the city in 2022. Mostly men, young and old, marked by life on the streets. Absent from themselves and others, as if dissolved, swallowed up by a nightmarish elsewhere. I walked through the city and saw these humans lying in the middle of the sidewalk, on the steps leading to the entrance of a brownstone, against a wall in a subway station. I saw people walking past them, brushing against them without seeing them, avoiding them with a glance that nevertheless touched them briefly. We don’t look. Out of modesty, out of fear. Yet I needed to document what I was seeing. So I decided to photograph them in the same way I passed them, like a passerby, with my phone held out at arm’s length, and to shoot continuously.
The images are not framed, they are raw, sometimes a little blurry, they are like my eye perceiving them without lingering. The images unfold like mini sequences in a film. Like you, I am discovering them. And I don’t want to close my eyes, to forget them.