“Living beings, beings who breathe, are the site where atmospheric immersion is transformed into a meshwork of lines that proliferate, just as the pumping motion of bellows in a forge turns solid mineral into fluid metal; or the air that inflates the lungs of the ploughman becomes furrows in the earth; or the wind that becomes the wake of a sailboat; or sunlight that turns into stems and plant roots. It is in this transformation that the relationship between lines and atmosphere resides, a relationship that is, I believe, fundamental to all animate life.”
Tim Ingold, A Brief History of Lines.

Photography is by essence instantaneous. What happens when we deliberately amputate its function of fixing reality? This is what I discovered as I sought to closely scrutinise that horizon line that keeps slipping away, deliberately turning my back on the Norman landscapes. What resides in these images is the memory of time. It settles in over the course of the day, little by little; it lies down softly as it passes through the camera and gathers the sum of everything that has existed.

Yet this sum is readable only as such; one can no longer disentangle the instants that compose it. Since we are not hypermnesic, we do not remember all the details that make up our day either. So as not to fall into madness, we remember the most striking moments and a vague impression of the whole, of this and of all the others we have already forgotten. In the same way, photographing the same frame from sunrise to sunset in a single image, stripped of any figurative element and giving each instant the same weight, ends up smoothing out all the details. A boat offshore, a clearing of light, waves almost redundant, a fertile cloud, the 1,800 triathlon swimmers, a shower, glories, a marvellous sunset, the cold — all will be erased by time. But the final image would have been different had these elements not left their marks on the film.

I do not claim to record a somatic colour matching the elements. Each photograph thus becomes the unique memory of the unique day that has just come to an end.