Most of these photographs were taken between October 2002 and September 2003, either inside our house or within a radius of 50 yards from it. I was all the more conscious of this limitation as during the same period I was editing the photos and rewriting the text of Time Machine, an account of a trip around the world, in 1962 and 1963 ; and of course I couldn't help comparing my mobility and my horizons of the past to those of the present.

The two projects are so different, that an ininformed viewer may not attribute them to the same photographer: the photos of Time Machine are in black and white, and intended to convey a traveller's impressions to readers of a magazine, while those of La Véronique are in colour, and meant to bear witness of a place I knew intimately and of a time precious to me.

(Readers interested in technology may care to know that La Véronique was produced with a digital camera: this allowed me to catch a range of highlights and shadows that had always fascinated me, but that traditional film couldn't cover.)

In fact, the limitation to a 50 yard radius didn't originate so much from a physical handicap, and even less from some conceptual approach: but from realizing that my emotions for what I saw, and my subsequent impulse to press the shutter, seemed to decrease in an inverse ratio to the distance from our house. As for instance in February 2003, when our almond flowers had frozen, but I had noticed another such tree, a few miles away, which was spared by the frost and whose flowers remained magnificent. Still, I refrained from photographing it, because my feeling for those other flowers wouldn't have been as intense.

In short, the photographs I had taken forty years ago were to show people, objects or situations that I thought to be of some general significance, while the purpose of La Véronique is to leave a trace of my present being, by showing small things that catch my attention and on which my eyes like to rest. This shouldn't prevent the viewer - or at least so I hope - from relating these photographs to his own references and memories.