I'm French, 22 and I'm currently living in Lyon, the town where I was born. Last year, after three boring years studying Communication and English in my hometown, I needed something new and crazy, an escape from the routine. I left for Australia in September, hoping for a second summer. I spent eight months there wandering all around the place, meeting new people all the time and doing miscellaneous jobs whenever I needed cash for the tank, the food and the beer. Now I'm back home, working in a stupid factory, taking pictures when I need to (just like I did for 5 years). I'm soon going back to New York to see my girlfriend when I got enough money for myself.
All of these pictures have a certain history in my life. They're mirrors of a moment, a feeling that made me push the button. If this feeling is not obviously inside the pictures, I feel intimately linked to them. But the link is off-frame, it is a strange mystery, and I’m the only to know it. I belong to these images, not the opposite. Who think one can own a picture, even its own? It's you to imagine what could have possibly made me put these pictures in my diary.
When I lived in Sydney, there was a hairdresser further up the road from my hostel in Bondi. Going back from the grocery once, I was walking by and thought I could take a picture. Just when I stepped in, he appeared in front of my face pulling up his pant.
The second picture is a man that I saw in a Waffle House in Atlanta this summer. He was staring at me when I took the picture. I will never figure what he was thinking at this very moment.
The last picture goes back to my time in Australia. My friend Nico and I almost had no money. Not much more than a hundred bucks for both of us. We had passed many towns on our way up from Sydney, asking for jobs where everyone was answering “It’s really quiet here mate, you should keep up North.”. We finally got stuck in a flooded town in Northern Queensland. We stayed there one week because all the exits where blocked. Luckily we found job under the table, working in a hotel moving furniture.
BENJAMIN MOULY // benjamin-mouly.blogspot.com