On Friday, November 13, 2016, at 4pm, I was in Washington DC.
American news channels provided us with the first images of the Paris attacks.
Being more than 6000 km away, I wasn’t there to share the fear, the shock and the despair of the Parisians.
On the evening of my return to Paris, in front of the Bataclan concert hall, I was struck by the amount of drawings, scribbled messages weathered by the rain, bottles of wine, flowers, photos of victims.
Fleeting evidence of everyone’s emotions.
Their powerful meaning overwhelmed me.
I wanted to shed light on some of these borrowed objects, photograph them against a white background with the help of a long-time friend and art object photographer, Pierre Yves Duval,
and thus protect them from their inevitable deterioration.
Each object immediately took on a unique status as an art object and tells a personal story.
Through these photos, I wish to keep these feelings alive for generations to come.
Yves Samuel