They are indeed a matter of a privileged psychic experience between the photographer and his subject, between the individual and his relationship to the world. So, beyond the images, Matthieu wants to share emotions. Passionate about photography for ten years, Matthieu associates his artistic work with his passion of authentic travels. Years ago explorers would bring back from their trips rare co
mmodities and travel stories. Nowadays, with means of transportation and communication shortening the geographical and cultural distances, the passion of adventure and exploration is to be reinvented. For Matthieu, photography makes the link between artistic expression and the concern about testimony and conservation by the image. Photography is thus turned into a process of appropriation of the world, a way of visually retranscribing a set of sensory experiences which go beyond the mere visual aspect. Literature, sensitive empathy and drunkenness of the fatigue of long walks all participate in the revelation of this intuitive film. No other quotation than that of Claude Lévi-Strauss ("Tristes Tropiques") could better describe this work of revelation:
" I wish I had lived at the time of the first expeditions, when one could witness the magnificence of the world spectacle, before it got spoiled and doomed (…)
I am tortured by a paradoxical alternative:either being an explorer in the past, enjoying a beauty he could not understand; or being a modern traveler looking for the remnants of a vanishing world (…)
In a few hundred years, in the same place, another traveler, as desperate as me, will mourn the vanished beauty I was not able to appreciate. Victim of a double infirmity, everything I see hurts me, and I blame relentlessly myself for not opening my eyes enough"
For Matthieu, each photography carries a feeling of unsatiated goal: the impossible retranscription of the experience. But it also carries the hope, thanks to sharing, to extend this moment which evaporated with the appearance of the world, revealed by the shiver of the camera shutter clicking.
