Slightly Nutty Street Photography

      The spring fair in Grenoble. It is not Las Vegas, but it's still a good place to have great sensations. Especially in some extreme rides, surrounded by the screams of people inside. As I took a walk at this fair last April, I noticed these two girls who were not taking any risk. Living such a trying ride by proxy, they just watched their friends screaming. Yet they really seemed to share their feelings.

    As the summer was ending, Sylvie and I found three baby cats hidden at the top of hay bundles in a barn. Sylvie could not resist the urge to climb a ladder nearby to get closer to them. And I could not resist the urge to photograph the four of them.

    Inside the Todai-ji temple in Nara, there are little stands selling lucky charms. I noticed one near the main entrance, specially dedicated to girls. When I came back to it after a while, I took this picture of a nicely arranged group of seven ladies, the youngest curiously looking at me.

     When I entered the barn, I wanted to shoot the old tractor lightened by a dim sunset. But all of a sudden, a kitten ran away from the door and hid behind a pile of potatoes. Hence I changed my mind and tried desperately to take its picture. Giving up and coming out of the barn, I heard the cat speeding towards me. I just had the time to kneel down and capture the little ghost before it vanished outside.

     Well, I'm back. Yes, I'm back. Possibly what this old farmer thought as he took a short coffee break in the middle of Beaucroissant's ancient agricultural fair. He was clearly not coming there just to have fun or to go for a walk through the stands like my son and I. No, he was there for serious business and you could easily tell from his concentrated and determined look. First a coffee. Black. Then he's back.

     I noticed this old lady from the other side of the street, at the end of a December afternoon. She was towing the big Christmas tree she had just bought in her trolley. Suddenly, she stopped in front of a shop of fine chocolates and then spent quite a long time wondering if she really wanted some or not. Or maybe thinking about life, which she could find to be like a box of chocolates. As a photographer, street is a bit alike: you never know what you're gonna get.  

     This picture of my brother was one of the first which made me realize what spontaneous photography could produce of beautiful moments. Especially when you do not expect them, until you find out after film is developed. To me this scene is reminiscent of one of the famous photographs Robert Capa took during the Spanish Civil War.

     Like The Prisoner, this old lady looked desperate to escape from an oppressive world. She kept on looking far ahead, eagerly waiting for her bus. I figured that, as a person who did not really care about how she looked to other people, she felt extremely oppressed by the ubiquitous marketing of the fashion industry. The two large and disturbing twin models on the billboards, with their impeccable hair and their inexpressive Terminator look, seemed to be chasing her.

     As I was wandering in a not so funny amusement park (although I had a great time there with my mom and my two kids), I noticed this couple several times in different places. They found it hard to walk and were cruising from bench to bench, enjoying the view at each new location. And they were the very first to notice the park's mascot, a pretty strange and disturbing human-sized rabbit, as it suddenly went on stage.

    Gazing on the new soft mask of snow upon the mountains and the moors (John Keats). I took this picture at the heart of the COVID-19 crisis, when people were so frightened that they were always wearing a mask. Like these two parents and their child (wearing a russian hat, not a mask) during a family walk in the snow. Small lumps of snow were falling from the trees and looked like small masks made of snow, as if the global fear were bleeding onto nature.

    The old man was having a coke in a small and empty veggie joint downtown. He looked so sad while drinking his Coke that I thought of this old slogan of Coca-Cola, omnipresent in France in the eighties : "Cette sensation s'appelle Coke", replacing it in my mind by "Cette sensation s'appelle tristesse" which seemed way more appropriate. But english slogans would work fine too like "Life Tastes Sad" or "Open Sadness". We really should distrust ads.

      For once the scene lasted quite a long time. There was this young boy with his edgy hair cut, looking completely out of sync with the joyfully frantic atmosphere of the great spring fair. He was standing near his family waiting for someone, and after a while he felt so tired that he leant over the counter of a shooting range. His solitary attitude, his weariness and his strange gaze at guns were disturbing enough to make me wait for the right moment.

      Even if Grenoble has banned publicity, big advertising pictures are still omnipresent all over the city. Especially on shop windows from where they can easily make you feel uncool. The young model in sunglasses was upsetting me this way when an old man walked slowly towards us with a stick.Wearing the same kind of sunglasses, he was already staring wisely at his younger self. I just had time to rush between parked cars and to shoot them both.

     Waiting for the end of my daughter's training in the tiny gymnasium near Grenoble's museum of art, I could witness the arrival of hyperactive boys craving to play and score a basket. It was like a storm rushing on the field. They were all shooting at the same time on the same basket, and the storm of their falling balls was raging. Then I tried to capture as many blurry balls as I could.

       There were lots of dogs, everywhere in the huge hall des expositions of Bourg-en-Bresse. And lots of masters too. Always very close, in all senses of the word, to each other. It was a very competitive dog show and you could feel both human and canine tension in the air. When I saw this woman waiting for her dog's turn to compete, I noticed that both of them were similarly stressed as if at a parent-teacher meeting and took their picture.

    The old man was feeding pigeons in Grenoble's Jardin des Plantes . While leaving the park towards the main entrance, he turned back and called with a slight whistling. Instead of a dog, it was a pigeon that suddenly came closer to him and landed on his hand. I was a bit too far from the scene but managed to shoot just before the bird flew away.

    This couple was wandering in the alleys of the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. It was a hot summer, and the man was clearly striving against urban heat. They came closer to the outdoor photography exposition about landscapes. As they crossed the sand dunes of Sahara, it seemed to me that they just had found their adequate scenery.

       I have always found shopping so boring. This thought was clearly shared by the little dog as its owner looked at clothes. Unlike her puppy, the lady was taking her time and enjoying this moment of happy consumption. I found the difference in their behaviours all the more amusing as it was consistent with their hair cuts and discreetly snapped this picture.

    This scene took place in a little street of Florence. Although in the heart of a hot summer, I was surprised that these old italian ladies and gentlemen were quite warmly dressed. They were talking a lot, but all remained strikingly motionless. Which did not prevent them to travel far away in their memories, as the postal slogan on the window revealed it.

     This kid was helping his grandfather during an agricultural show, with several threshing machines in demonstration. I really noticed them when they start climbing one machine, the young boy following his grandpa on the ladder. The small cloud has been brought out nicely thanks to a red filter which I was trying by curiosity (and never used again thereafter).

     My first trip to Ostende was in winter and I loved its melancholic atmosphere. Coming back a few years later, I realized that it kept this magic even in the middle of summer. Turning his back to the beach and the casino, an old man was taking a digestive nap. He was in such a deep sleep that he made the scene look like a dream.

     Sometimes supermarkets are not as boring as they seem and can even surprise you. Not because they are interesting per se, but thanks to the people passing through. I liked the way this girl was thoroughly looking at the posters, her little brother commenting each of them. Then the leopard appeared suddenly out of nowhere, making the little boy jump and me take this picture.

     Is it safe? Is it really safe to wait for a whopper at Burger King? After some shopping at Carrefour? And without any smartphone to enjoy free Wi-Fi? All these questions came to my mind as I framed this bored couple. Slightly out of focus, the picture looks like an Edward Hopper's painting that would have been parasitized by our consumer society's imagery. And the man definitely looks like the nazi villain in Marathon Man, hence the question.

   It's funny how often you come across the same people when you wander in a city neither too big nor too small. I had often met this lady before, staring through  her glasses at something she did not seem to find. Struck by her resemblance to the younger self on the wall, I eventually took her picture at the market on a cold sunday morning.

     The Beaucroissant agricultural fair is eight centuries old. For the kids, there are a few merry-go-rounds and the beautiful shooting gallery of this picture. I like the way the young boy is literally flanked by the three old men. This is kind of an initiation.

     As I passed her, the little girl was already leaning against the glass wall,  staring into space. She was in my back when I heard a tram's bell and turned around. The scene of her crossing this magic mirror made me shot it immediately. And since then for me her name's Alice.

     I love flea markets. There are so many different objects, with so many potential serendipitous matches floating in ever changing decors. In Grenoble's quartier Saint-Laurent towards the end of a sunday afternoon, I noticed the lady at the center aiming at taking down a deer head and rushed to catch the scene. A few weeks later, I was pleasantly surprised by its dreamlike negative and printed this picture which always makes me think of a Fellini film set I would have been allowed in.

    At the laundry which was close to Grenoble's maison du tourisme, a dad was using a washcloth as a puppet to entertain his kid. Waiting for my clothes to dry, I was reading a book before going for a walk with my camera. Although I lost the film since then, I remember that I took only one shot and that I liked it very much once developed.