I was born in 1928. I think that it was around the age of eight that I first began to wonder if I would see the year 2000. And today, on the first of December 1999, as I write these words, I still ask myself the same thing. One could say that time and its inescapable deadline has always been one of my main preoccupations.

That would explain one side of my vocation of photography (the illusion of stopping time); the other, is the inner need, which has led me to the undertaking presented on this site: a photographic journal, conceived as a sort of composite panorama of my world.

The justification for this project isn't just the three zeros of the milllennium; it seems to me (and no doubt I'm not alone in thinking it) that at no time in human history have we had such dizzying changes in life styles and values than at the end of this century. Even the futuristic novels of Orwell and Huxley, which I devoured in my adolescence, didn't enable me to imagine the mix of languages and races I can observe on the Underground in London; the variety of vegetables, from everywhere and from every season, which are spread out before my eyes in any provincial supermarket; the absurd gesticulations in the streets of Rome, as passers by (and motorists) press their mobile phones to their ear with one hand, and, with the other, grandiloquently emphasise their conversation with some invisible partner; or simply the clic of your mouse, dear cybernaut, bringing these words and pictures on screen.

But what perhaps astonishes me even more, is that alongside the globalisation, the new technologies, the genetic engineering, the breaking down of ideologies and taboos, certain islands in our world (rather like Sleeping Beauty's castle) remain hardly touched by these changes. In East Berlin, houses still show bomb scars from the last war; on Corfu, a few miles from the international airport, peasants lead their donkeys and their goats; in Cotignac, in the Haut Var, the cart track to my house has not been repaired since the Big Freeze of 1956, after which farmers deserted the hillsides; and on televison, night after night, I see defenceless women and children massacred in the name of some religious fanaticism or ancestral hate.

These contradictions give rise to hopes and fears for the future, all of which I feel - but which I am not seeking to express (or at least not so explicitly) in this photographic project. I would rather that this work be seen as a sort of inventory of my visual horizon; but also - and without the two aspects contradicting each other - as an expression of my gratitude to destiny, for being born (and surviving) in such an exceptional and crucial period. Rather like the votive offering that, in the past, believers would hang up in churches, to bear witness to a gift of Providence, and leave as a remembrance for their descendants: " for grace received ".

As for this last year of the millennium (or year before last according to some - not that it matters), my objective has been to take, between January 1st and December 31st, at least one significant photograph each day (though not necessarily an excellent one). I am badly qualified to say if I have achieved it; but I know that in accepting this constraint I have obliged myself to remain continually open to everything around me and to question the meaning of each gesture and each object. " The most difficult thing, " wrote Goethe " is what is thought to be the simplest : to really see the things which are before your eyes ".

As for the people, the objects, the events to photograph - the limits of " my visual horizon " have been not so easy to define. I've had the good fortune to have five children and six grandchildren - their images will certainly form part of this journal. During the year I have met with people I love or admire, and I have seized the opportunity to take their portraits. I have photographed the house in Boulogne-Billancourt where I usually live, the " bastide " at Cotignac where I spend my holidays, places in Paris and its suburbs which intrigue me. I have gone back to themes which I have been passionate about at other periods in my life and which still occupy my dreams and my imagination: faces of women, trees, animals, landscape, architecture. I have undertaken photo trips to the fifteen countries of the European Union; because I am quite proud to call myself a European, and because the reunification of our continent still seems to me to be one of the great events of this end of the century. And I have attempted on several occasions to capture images of the seventy two year old man that I am.

Inevitably one will notice omissions. I have taken no photographs of war, of misery, of suffering or of madness; not because I am indifferent to these calamities, but because I neither feel that I have the moral justifciation, nor (in the case of war) the physical courage, to confront such situations through my lens. I have not sought out rich, famous or powerful people, in so far as these people are not part of my world. I have not tried to reveal my sexuality or that of others, because I've never done it in the past and at my age it would be unseemly to start. I haven't touched on certain worlds which feature a lot in the media, but which remain to me (no doubt wrongly) totally foreign; such as sport, business, contemporary music or fashionable "sub-cultures".

One regret is that I have not had the time (or the means) to return to countries such as India, the United States, China or Japan, which at different times in my life have meant a lot to me; or to visit other countries in Africa, South America and the former Soviet Union which I have often dreamed about and which I still don't know.

Anyway, the panorama cannot be complete. It's not even certain that my grandchildren will recognise it as the world of their childhood. Perhaps all they will see will be the trajectory of my vision, formed by references from the nineteenth century, nourished by experiences of the twentieth and still curious what the small fragment of the new millennium remaining for me will bring. And so it is a sort of selfportrait. Which is to say: just one more illusion of escaping the clutches of time.

Frank Horvat,

December 1st, 1999