There are many ways in which the thing I am trying in vain to say may be tried in vain to be said.
(Samuel Beckett, Three Dialogues)

It was while studying modern literature, then visual anthropology that I began practicing as a self-taught photographer. From the start, I produced images with the intention of the exhibition, as an artist, along other activities.

Inspired by other arts and human sciences, in an approach that is often too quickly deemed documentary, my work is halfway between political and poetic. From trying one thing to the next, my interest is less in asserting a style than in exploring the means best suited to the situation or reflection.

To try is, for me, the only position possible, as compelling as the question has always been: what is the correct way to be a photographer, considering on the one hand the suspicion that inherently haunts each image and, on the other, the proliferation, repletion, and trivialization of all kinds of images?

The legacy of the past, the trials of exclusion, the construction of identity: these questions have structured a number of my works, to the extent of later disturbing my own trajectory with a troubling connection.

I am also often drawn to the idea of what defines a territory, that is to say its boundaries and the ways in which it is developed, occupied, and crossed. With a definite inclination to survey the city, its interstices and peripheries.

Beyond every context, in the face of history or absurdity, it is always about questioning existence, despite the resistance of the real. Here it is not a matter of being affirmed, as a postulate (that goes without saying), but of that experienced, as in a battle (nothing goes without saying).

If there is a clear tension between presence and absence in my images, which is at the very heart of the photographic act, perhaps the notion of strangeness, more than the one of disappearance, makes everything clearer. When this term refers to the sensation, cast into the world, of being a stranger, in your own home, or even within yourself, wherever that may be.

In this regard, isn’t the only worthwhile quest—and there are writers and filmmakers who should be mentioned here—that of another place, another state, another form. Quickly. Before it’s too late.

Beyond the images, what will really remain are genuine problems of vision, (…) the difficult learning of new thresholds in perceiving the world.
(Bernard Lamarche-Vadel, Lignes de mire)

Julien Chapsal, 01-2025.