Photographed photographers

This journey in pictures, started more than 30 years ago, enjoys capturing the quasi-universal situations where our contemporaries photograph each other, from Paris to Beijing, from Luxor to Bombay, from Austin to Dublin …

Most of the photos show the photographer and his subject at the moment of the shot. Yet some leave the subject enshrouded in mystery. Others catch the moment before, when the photographer is worried about his framing or dust on his lens, or the moment after, when the satisfied photographer relaxes his attention and puts his camera down.

All of them, however, are the result of a close bond between the photographer of the photographers and the photographer being photographed. A mirror image which is never cruel or mocking, but where the one projects and feels for the other and where sometimes the other returns the gaze of the first, so that one no longer knows, in the end, which is the photographer and the photographed. The variety of situations presented does, however, preclude only one, the selfie, for which the photographed no longer needs the photographer, an egotistical posture that eliminates the social relationship inherent in photography.

And if the photographer sometimes becomes the photographed, in a sort of self-portrait, at least he needs to be observed by another person who looks at him and who sends him back by the reflection in his glasses, his image of himself as a photographer.