Trading Fairytales was photographed between 2005 and 2007. During the periods of confinement of the past months, I went through my archives and rediscovered this series.
The story, like most documentary work looks at the interaction between people and a certain territory, in this case this is Disneyland in Paris. What does a place or an idea do to people ? How does it influence them and how are they reacting to it ? Disneyland is an extraordinary space where the commonplace and the artifice are displayed with rare intensity, like a theatre of the absurd performed on a overcrowded highway service area.
The pictures are not so much about the individual behind the portrait but rather about what visitors in this amusement park might look like. Most of the time, we only spoke briefly, I asked them if they would agree to pose for a photo and the encounter never exceeded fifteen minutes. I didn’t have a predefined set of criteria and neither could I tell what kind of personality attracted my attention but there was certainly a choice about who would pose for a picture, and probably also from behalf of the visitors as they agreed or disagreed. Maybe it has something to do with the theatrical, a brief moment where they appear at the same time as characters on a fictional stage and witnesses of their environment.
