Tom Girondel
Photographer

A fragile and essential frontier between the maritime zone and inland, coastal areas cradle the populations at every tide and storm. This appeasement that the latter give me since my childhood has been my starting point; it's there that I explore these pieces, with the aim of gathering a collective memory of the so privileged relationship between human beings with this nature implanted for millions of years.

A place of leisure and relaxation, this environment is becoming the worst enemy of the population. How can we represent this so fragile link of an environment that is so unstable by nature, harrowing by taking into account the sea level rise and paradoxically attractive? Helped by the elements, my fieldwork represents clichés that can convey ideas and concepts in a strong way which are not filled with guilt-laden speeches, political promises and other statistics.

Aquatic and geological, these patterns reveal themselves with a suitable light, even at dusk, which inspire my shots: a rising, restless or stormy sea comforts the strength of feelings. In the backwash and at low tide, in its fall, remains appear, metaphors of the darkest questionings of the humanity. Those are then transformed into fragments under the eye of a voluntarily aestheticizing photograph. My choice of an assumed contrast allows me to also seek fear and tranquility by representing the smallness of Man facing Mother Nature which will be turning fiercer.

The series then allows the gaze to question the place of mankind in front of the natural elements in a doomed fight. For it plays on this ambiguity of the eye, at the same time distant, appealing to our own interpretation of nature, and at the same time very close, without perceiving its exact origin.

Co-authored with Céline Cailliau