Photographer, writer, and director, Raymond Depardon seems to be able to do it all. He has covered all aspects of photography, from his first steps at the native Le Garet Farm, to celebrity hideouts, from reporting for the press to street photography and independent documentaries.

This survey book hinges on four main themes: la terre natale [homeland], les voyages [journeys], la douleur [pain], l’enfermement [confinement].

With writing as the Ariadne’s thread, this publication invites on a journey through the artist’s work from his beginnings at Le Garet Farm until today. With Depardon, writing and photography offer two very different temporalities: writing is primarily listening to yourself, daring to impose your own rhythm faced with what comes along, the famous “absences” of the photographer.

Avoiding the rhetoric of compassion which has never appealed to him, creating slightly ordinary, calm images, without any particular eloquence, but full of emotion; a clear agenda that leads him alternately into intentional wandering and the decisive production of an archive to be passed on.