Boulogne-Billancourt is the suburb of Paris where I live. Boulogne (which lies just beyond the Bois de Boulogne) used to be a middle-class residential area of small houses and gardens, while Billancourt was an industrial suburb and the site of Renault, the car maker.These days, the villas as well as the factories are being demolished and replaced by office-buildings and apartment houses: which is to say that Boulogne-Billancourt is neither poetic, nor exciting, nor exceptional in any way. My original reason for photographing it, was that the doctor had ordered me do some walking every day, and that to make it a little less boring, I decided to take my Leica along.

At some point, I told myself that what seemed unexciting to me, may be of some interest to future generations - just as the drab little shops and street-corners, that Atget photographed almost a century ago, have become meaningful to us. The challenge was to look at Boulogne-Billancourt with the eyes of some nostalgic image-browser of the late twenty-first century, who may marvel at our garage entrances and garbage containers, exclaiming: "Oh, how strange!", "How funny!", or even "How poetic!" At times, while I was pointing my Leica on a butcher's display or on a police barrier, a passer-by would stop to ask: "Would you mind telling me why you photograph this?" I was delighted about this kind of question, and even more about the shoulder-shrugging of some friends, to whom I had shown my first results - as if these reactions were a proof that what I was photographing was something that had yet to be noticed.

A "frequently asked question" is whether there has been any digital intervention in these images. The answer is no: for once, I wished to come back to traditional photography.