The Watchers, for Eye On Main Street Residency, Wilson North Carolina, 2024.
« We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are. » Anais Nin
This is not an excuse, but more an explanation. I imagined this residency for a whole month and It turned out being 15 days.
So.
I was there sitting on the hotel bed and wondering, what will i do now? How am I gonna use this time to create? Because if a month seems short, 15 days is pretty nothing. How to meet people and tell a story? How to produce something meaningful without cheating but telling my truth?
Thus, I sticked to my first impression and the feeling that the city made me feel from day one.
Emptiness. First point.
No one walk outside. Even when they go to fast foods, people stay in their cars. As if there were something dangerous in the air outside. As if walking was something really unusual.
I barely met no one while walking but only empty chairs staring at me. A man once stopped his car to ask me about my work. As we discussed, him still sitting in his car and me photographing a tree, he told me « hey you know I saw this photographer taking donuts one day, you see there is really nothing here to see ».
I found that funny.
But for me, as a stranger, Wilson was this small town you only see in US TV dramas with a mystery murderer lurking somewhere or a big secret known by a few people of the community. Me, I was this weird character passing by and digging old dirty secrets.
Maybe it was a mistake, maybe I was all wrong, maybe I was to lazy, but hey, I decided to stick to this disturbing feeling of mystery. It felt like I was always watched by someone but I never met this Watcher.
At first it was awkward but then it was like a game for me: The pursuit of something odd in Wilson. As if something was about to happen in the corner of a street or an enigmatic event just had happened.
In order to emphasize this feeling and evoke this atmosphere, I decided to take photos during dawn and dusk and search for small anomalies.
Light and composition were the most important to convey confusion between perception and reality, to blur the lines between what you see and what you feel, between the visible and the invisible.
Even though these photos are empty of human being, you can always feel their presence and that make it photos of life, still. « Still Life » which is funny because in French we say « Nature Morte » (dead nature) . Life, death, invisible, I guess all the ingredients are united here to write a detective novel!
« We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are. » Anais Nin
This is not an excuse, but more an explanation. I imagined this residency for a whole month and It turned out being 15 days.
So.
I was there sitting on the hotel bed and wondering, what will i do now? How am I gonna use this time to create? Because if a month seems short, 15 days is pretty nothing. How to meet people and tell a story? How to produce something meaningful without cheating but telling my truth?
Thus, I sticked to my first impression and the feeling that the city made me feel from day one.
Emptiness. First point.
No one walk outside. Even when they go to fast foods, people stay in their cars. As if there were something dangerous in the air outside. As if walking was something really unusual.
I barely met no one while walking but only empty chairs staring at me. A man once stopped his car to ask me about my work. As we discussed, him still sitting in his car and me photographing a tree, he told me « hey you know I saw this photographer taking donuts one day, you see there is really nothing here to see ».
I found that funny.
But for me, as a stranger, Wilson was this small town you only see in US TV dramas with a mystery murderer lurking somewhere or a big secret known by a few people of the community. Me, I was this weird character passing by and digging old dirty secrets.
Maybe it was a mistake, maybe I was all wrong, maybe I was to lazy, but hey, I decided to stick to this disturbing feeling of mystery. It felt like I was always watched by someone but I never met this Watcher.
At first it was awkward but then it was like a game for me: The pursuit of something odd in Wilson. As if something was about to happen in the corner of a street or an enigmatic event just had happened.
In order to emphasize this feeling and evoke this atmosphere, I decided to take photos during dawn and dusk and search for small anomalies.
Light and composition were the most important to convey confusion between perception and reality, to blur the lines between what you see and what you feel, between the visible and the invisible.
Even though these photos are empty of human being, you can always feel their presence and that make it photos of life, still. « Still Life » which is funny because in French we say « Nature Morte » (dead nature) . Life, death, invisible, I guess all the ingredients are united here to write a detective novel!