Cities make me dream

Alain Carayol takes his bag and hops on a train or a plane, before getting on a bus. Finally, he walks. He’s in another city. He hides in the crowd, watches, waits for the right moment, shoots and then leaves. “You have to have a risky approach to the point of not knowing where to sleep” acknowledged the illustrious crime writer Georges Simenon. When you seek to create, spontaneity is king. However, a question then arises, that of the direction taken and the meaning drawn from the experience. How should we characterize the desire to leave? What current are we relying on? Under what tension? What is this tenacious desire that allows you to go up and down? Carayol’s approach is a different from “one where the image is created even before the shooting, with the presence of extras and the design of a set”. We find ourselves therefore, no more and no less, in a photographic writing that seizes the opportunities of life as it unfolds, along the way. Here in the street, for a second and the picture is balanced. The image, which brings together all the elements of the scene, opens us to several dimensions, including that of fiction as a hazardous outcome.
The people in these images are an emanation of the reality they help to embody at their expense. In this way, appear strangers who are just ordinary people, before being magnified by the photographer’s lens. Favoring the expression of reality – and all that it entails in terms of chance – is undoubtedly the condition for delivering an emotion that sometimes borders on the divine or at least on a supernatural order.

Michel le Brigand