RETIRED (France) in progress 2014 - …

I went far away to build myself and to discover the ‘other’. There is little doubt the decade I lived abroad participated in the impression of losing touch with my own identity and origins. In 2013 I spent months in South Korea meeting and photographing Korean Mothers who abandoned their child in the 1970’s and 80’s: the very #mothers who could have been ours, internationally adopted children. This enduring investigation brought the collateral understanding that my roots actually lay in France, with what is left of my adoptive family.

My relationship with my #father was fragile and unstable. With years passing, the souvenir of confrontations, anger and missunderstandings fade away. Even the good is sometimes hard to recollect, while our respective shyness prevent us to even speak of what is left to be remembered. I don’t want to ever forget now, and I want to indelibly print –for myself and for my daughter, who this man is, at these T Times of our lives. As Roland Barthes stated, “cameras are clocks for seeing”. I am very well aware numbers of great essays have already been dedicated to photographers relatives. While the work is about my father, it also aims to draw attention to those who never make the headlines, but whose existence remains a daily silent struggle. My father is like many other aging people: an #average man of 71 years old, living in an average French city, with a quite low average retirement pension. #Retired project states sickness and death are not the only things that cause worry and concern, and it intends to expore the stasis of my father’s ordinary journey and his passive efforts to fill up the empty hours.