People In The Crowd All Over The World

Intimacy within the collective. Approaching a subject who does not know us and whom we do not know, yet who feels so familiar. For a short instant of my existence, immortalized by the click of my camera, I meet the people of the crowd.

We are universal beings. Our individuality manifests itself through universality.

I like to think that in the invisible world, we are nothing but energy, coloured lights. These energies manifest in the visible world through the incarnation of a person or an animal. We are not so different, in my mind, because in the invisible world we are only light. I believe there exist multiple coloured lights, different energies that come to incarnate themselves in the visible world. This allows me to think that the people or animals with whom we share a sincere connection, whom we recognize, can be explained by the fact that we originate from the same energy in the invisible world, only separated by different bodies in the visible world.

We are pieces of one another. We do not know each other, yet we recognize ourselves in certain people. Surely because throughout our existence, the energy incarnated in each individual has lived, lives, and will live what the other has been, is, and will be, only through different prisms. What is universal are the stages of life, the emotions we feel, which allow us to recognize and understand each other. Our individuality is our perspective on this universality, our way of feeling, seeing, and being.

We are, in reality, quite familiar to each other, even though we do not know one another, for our only limit is our ignorance. Yet there is so much to know, so much to see, in order to encounter one another, to look at each other, to love each other, without ever truly knowing, since we only ever see existence through our own prism.

I wish to encounter people in the crowd without necessarily understanding their individual perspective. I can converse with them without speaking a single word. To see them and appreciate their existence is enough to meet them. I accept that they leave their mark, and I choose never to forget them.

People In The Crowd All Over The World is a photographic collection that I believe will accompany me throughout my existence, for it allows me to encounter the faces and stories of the crowd. I am merely an observer, but my subject, who does not know me, holds an important place in my existence. They are unaware, but I have integrated them as a piece of myself. This fragment, I materialize it through this collection of photographs.

One photograph from this collection is a photographic collage I call Plaquette, a project that allows me to explore a concept I have developed regarding our individuality within universality: what I call Kolémotion.

Kolémotion is a word I have invented to express how every existing thing is the product of an assimilation of interdependent elements. This plaquette is itself an assimilation of several photographs, elements that constitute a whole. And I, what I am, am nothing but an assimilation of encounters, thoughts and ideas, emotions and discoveries that I integrate throughout my existence, my constitution.

We are all People In The Crowd, All Over The World.