Small shops

It is five years I have been walking around towns and villages across France, looking for these small shops. Whenever I found one, I made a portrait of it, usually full-face and full-length, and added it to my collection, a modest Atget-like inventory of a form of popular culture. In these pictures, there is no one around and yet, in all of them, I can strongly feel some human presence. These shop windows are like faces telling us about human stories, both individual and collective, past or still present. Beyond their old-fashioned beauty, I can make out ingenious lives of work, self-assertive or more humble personalities, desires that have been fulfilled or have faded away. Leaving a trace is a way of paying homage to them but also of acknowledging their persistence in our contemporary world and making room for them in our collective imagination.