No one makes the same portrait twice

Over several years, in different countries and at different stages of my life, I built this series of portraits. At the time I made them, each photograph belonged to a particular encounter. Gathered and ordered over time, the images began to reveal something else.
The portraits form an (in)voluntary cartography of the places I have lived in and left behind. But they also record something less visible: the transformations of the gaze from which they were made. Each photograph thus holds two presences: the person who stood in front of the camera and the one who chose how to look. Between one image and the next, time, distance, experience and memory intervene.
The pose is always the same: standing, frontal, looking at the camera. This constancy does not seek to erase the person who holds it, but quite the opposite: it works as a typology. By fixing the form, the only thing that can vary from one image to another is what each person and each moment brings with them. The repetition of the gesture is what makes it possible to see, by contrast, everything that changes.
Over time, seen from the present, these portraits cease to be only images of others and begin to build, in a fragmentary way, a self-portrait.