Born in 1975 in Paris, I practice photography right out of childhood, in addition to then replacing the pleasure of drawing. 

Sorely lacking in inspiration in Paris (my fault, not his…), I only take the camera out when travelling. The rest of the time, I teach and pursue my research in philosophy. 

Beyond the necessary partitioning of these activities (cannot be both in a Parisian library and at the end of the world), it seems to me that my photography is steeped in existential-philosophical questions.

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The ordeal of freedom (Text from the preface to the photo book of the same name.)

"Do you have to comment on your personal production yourself? What's the point of adding meaning to meaning, and verb to image? Commenting on your photographs is a redundant and rather useless process - don't they speak for themselves? "To express one's feelings about their genesis and their motives amounts to talking about oneself. So, sterile duplication or complacent autobiography, I feel that I will really escape neither one nor the other − that I am apologizing.

An invariable structure gives the whole its unity: a character, man or woman, seems to wander in an often unusual environment (surreal interiors, natural curiosities, fantastic landscapes). Interrogative, perplexed, anxious, dreamy, resigned or revolted, he seeks nothing, or seeks everything; it goes nowhere, or goes precisely towards what usually seems to be “nowhere”: desert, ocean, impenetrable forest, obstacles of all kinds. “Traveller without luggage”, he has no assignable identity. His nudity makes him almost a universal extra. Except that he is indeed a living and singular individual, and the feelings that seem to inhabit him put a flesh on his abstract silhouette.

This contrast is undoubtedly my first object of fascination: to make the charge of a singular existence felt in a timeless universe, to draw the contours of a vulnerable humanity in an inhuman setting. In a way, I describe man as a vain, absurd or desperate being. But it is to better demonstrate its strength and emancipatory dynamism. Basically, my only subject, I believe, is freedom – liberation, rather. My photos tell the story of an individual who, through his nightmares and his troubles, finds in himself the strength of a kind of redemption, of self-absolution.

He is indeed alone, and seems to be able to count only on himself. Here and there he crosses paths with some character, just as wandering as he is: the solution does not seem to come from this side. Heaven does not bring more help: it is empty. Everything happens as if the usual purveyors of meaning had deserted the universe: father, mother, society, divinity – nothing of the sort here. There is only the loneliness of the individual, and his responsibility to invent meaning himself.

From a desperate portrayal of the human, we move imperceptibly to the Promethean vision of a humanism of autonomy: man alone decides for himself, sovereignly. But, just as a gleam of freedom remains in the darkest photographs, a doubt always haunts those which show the triumphant man. Gravity and ecstasy are the reverse side of the same coin.

A photograph demonstrates nothing; at most it can cause a few dreamy thoughts. My images are like philosophical dreams. Their subjects are freedom, loneliness, meaning, anguish, death, life, and other metaphysical-existential abstractions. The very composition of the photographs manifests a refusal of the concrete, of the particular, of the social and historical contingencies which are nevertheless those of every man. I scrupulously erase all the details that could bring a shot back to an assignable place and time − as much as possible, at least.

This desire for the abstract and the universal undoubtedly manifests a very concrete personal story, in an era that is itself very identifiable. I only hope that this rooting, which is inevitable, gives body to what is represented rather than canceling out the message. Because it is precisely a question of questioning the capacity of each one to transcend their condition, and thus to test their enigmatic freedom.

Vincent Citot

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Photographer artist represented by the Art and Miss Gallery