Written in 2013.
I spent part of the year 1993 visiting zoological gardens in France and other countries, in order to photograph animals to insert in the photomontages of Horvat ‘s Bestiary. My idea – as I put it – was to ‘liberate them from their cages, from the concrete floors and from the watching eyes of humans surrounding them: as I would like them to go on roaming in nature – and as I meet them in my dreams’. Véronique, my wife, worked hard to ‘select’ them, hair by hair, from their original photographs, and I did my best to place them into appropriate surroundings (as they can be seen in some of the montages in this website). Then, a few years later, I looked at them again, on the original contact sheets, and wondered if in some cases it wouldn’t have been just as well to leave as they were…
I called this series People like you and me: because this was what I felt when photographing them.