"My mother was a concierge, and we lived in staff accommodation under the roof of the town hall in Beaumont, Auvergne, where I grew up. To see outside, you had to climb some steps: the large windows let in intense light and framed the sky perfectly. You had to grow up first to see. I spent my time at night looking at the building opposite. I remember waiting for the accident, but this sample of France was hopelessly more sensible than my adolescent voyeuristic desires."

This is how Julien Mignot retrospectively describes his photographic epiphany and the starting point that sparked his curiosity about his fellow human beings. Without knowing it, the Screenlove series already existed behind his pair of binoculars. Twenty years later, in 2017, now an established photographer, Mignot decided to adapt this adolescent voyeuristic vision to the modern world. The internet is a window on the world, social media allows everyone to reveal their private lives, and that's all he needed to begin his motionless research. Glued to his screen, he documents the open-source daily lives of thousands of people who leave their cameras on, with the aim of being watched. It is on live porn performer websites that he finds a platform that meets his expectations. Exhibitionists inhabit the last page, with the cream of the crop being young people from all over the world, some exuberant, some demure, some organized, some independent, evolving as you scroll through the pages toward local, raw, uninhibited practices. For professionals, it's about gathering as many voyeurs as possible behind their webcams, who tip with tokens to trigger or encourage the broadcasters' escapades. The presentation pages are reminiscent of the heyday of MySpace and tell the stories of their authors. By opening several windows, you can hear four Colombians enjoying themselves, while listening to a peroxide-blonde American playing the ukulele, a Japanese woman singing into her pink connected toy, and a Ukrainian couple playing Mario Kart.

The world before his eyes is a familiar one, but coded. It is populated by ostriches, barbecues, shabby sofas, bouncy box springs, Eiffel Tower wallpaper, and skateboards belonging to Minnesota hipsters. Living in these settings are Chilean alektotophiles, Romanian xylophiles, smoking gays, couples dressed as rabbits who cut up their jeans on demand, multicolored dildos, unicorns, pierced perverts, traders masturbating in Rolexes, an Australian cyclist leaning over himself in perverse acrobatics, Russian fans of Jean-Claude Vandam, and a Canadian woman who loves to comb her hair for a long time.

Faced with this abundance of material, Julien Mignot decided to collect it all. He photographed the screen with his Leica to preserve the photographic act. Once the minimum focus distance was exceeded, he moved closer, blurring faces to preserve the anonymity of his subjects and get closer to the flesh. When the sets were empty, he compulsively collected them. He recorded all the sounds and compiled them into “sex tapes,” remixed cassettes that make up the soundtrack of the series. Like a documentary photographer, he observes this biotope through a magnifying glass and describes, through this pornographic prism, a more basely ordinary, stratified, coded world, a world of castes where the enjoyment and exposure of fantasies implicitly tells the story of our standardized, modest, and normal world.