"Is there any project that you have been dreaming about, and that you haven't yet had a chance to undertake?" This tempting proposition came from Jean Marc Dabadie, the publishing director of L'IMPRIMERIE NATIONALE, a French institution that dates back to Renaissance king François I, and that is still printing prestige publications for the government. Several answers were on the tip of my tongue, but I knew that Dabadie expected some highbrow idea for an expensive book. So I said: "I've always wanted to photograph the sculptures of Degas". In fact I had never particularly thought of this - though it is true that I like photographing sculptures, which to me is a work of interpretation, almost as when a performer interprets music.

Of Degas' sculptural work (which he did in wax, and which he considered an exercise), only seventythree statuettes have been preserved and cast in bronze. I obtained permission to photograph them at the Musée d'Orsay, where they are to be seen, on condition that the small basement room, which had been equipped for that purpose, would be constantly guarded by a watchman, and that the statuettes would only be handled by museum personnel wearing special gloves. My first problem was to get rid of some of the reflections on the bronze, which in photographs are even more disturbing than in reality. While trying to find a solution to this (by a combination of indirect light and polarizing filters), I realized that I was finding out much more about the sculptures when seeing them through the viewfinder, than when just looking at them with the naked eye. I concluded that my photographs might help other people to better understand this art. Maybe one day someone would say to me: "Degas' sculptures don't look the same to me since I have seen your photographs" - just as I had been told about the "Portaits of Trees".

This gave me a feeling of excitement, but also of responsibility: everytime I pressed the button, I asked myself: "would Degas approve of this light and this angle?" (the question was all the more to the point, as Degas had been a competent photographer himself). I tried to find the answers by studying his paintings and his drawings, and also by imagining him in his studio, working on the statuettes. "The light must have been falling in from a window to the north" I thought "as in most painters' studios. He must have looked at his work from a distance about the length of his arm. He was probably standing, in such a way as to slightly look down on the statuettes, and of course he would rotate them now and then, to see the effect from different angles." To reproduce this situation, I used a window-sized panel, on which I reflected the beam of an arc light; the lens had to be a medium-to-long zoom, the camera was placed on a tripod, so as to be tilted slightly downwards, and the glove-wearing attendant had to slowly rotate the statuettes, while my assistant tried different light effects, by varying the position of the arc light and the panel. Meanwhile, I kept changing the angle of the polarizing filter, so as to minimize the reflections on the bronze. After some trials and errors, there would come a moment when all these parameters fitted. All of a sudden, it would be as if the statuette in my viewfinder was coming to life, and I would cry out "stop! here she is!"