HORVATLAND - THE THIRD MILLENIUM - PROJECTS - LA VÉRONIQUEGO TO HOME

2003 From my introduction to La Véronique

This project was called after our house in Provence, which in turn is named after my wife. Most of these photographs were taken between October 2002 and September 2003, either in 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 those years to those of my present. The two projects are so different, that an ininformed viewer may not attribute them to the same author: the photos of Time Machine are in black and white, and intended to convey a traveller’s impressions to magazine readers, while those of La Véronique are in colour, and meant to bear witness of a place I knew intimately and of a time that was precious to me. In fact, the limitation to a 50 yard radius didn’t originate so much from a physical handicap, and even less from a 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 had been 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 would be of some general significance, while the purpose of La Véronique was 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.