Rare are the territories that concentrate so many paradoxes. The Etang de Berre is today one of the most important petrochemical complexes in Europe (and one of the most dangerous), but it also hosts everything one would expect from a seaside region. Spectacular night fishing, duck hunting, beach fun and the most innovative water sports are practiced there. But these realities are fragmented, interspersed with high-risk industrial activity that sweeps across the landscape and conditions ways of life. Faced with this excess, man tries to find his place and daily invents strategies for survival and reconquest...

Since 1996, Franck Pourcel has photographed this territory with the dual approach that characterizes his work: both artistic and ethnological. His images somehow write the invisible story of those who inhabit the pond, workers, fishermen, bathers, all "forgotten by a small sea" that flows into the Mediterranean.

Jean-Louis Fabiani brings a sociological light to these photos: these words tell the human memory of a territory too often reduced to its landscape appearance and its pollution peaks.