During Abandoned Place Exploration, I Take Selfies To Keep A Little Memory, And Here Are 30 Images Taken Over The Last 11 Years

I’ve been fascinated by abandoned places since childhood. I started photography around 15. It was for me a way to keep memories of my travels. Then, I started exploring abandoned buildings near Paris. At first, I was mainly interested in visiting them; I wanted to go away from Paris, as I felt I was spending too much time in the city. I needed to breathe in the countryside. I went for a day to explore some abandoned houses with a friend in the north of Paris, I realized it was exactly what I wanted. Photography came little by little. In the beginning, I just wanted to bring back memories of my trips, so I didn’t really work on the composition. The result was pretty messy. But with time, I gave more attention to photography itself and tried to have an aesthetic approach to give a good reflection of what the place was looking like. Then, I discovered a community doing the same and sharing their work on forums, which helped me to learn and pushed me to improve my skills. With time I left the report mode to focus more on the images. I wanted to convey the atmosphere you can feel in one of those places. I would imagine that, like many people, discovering the decaying house at the end of the street is a memory we all have deep inside of us. For me, it was the abandoned truck factory near my grandmother's house that I used to explore every summer. When I encounter such a place, my goal is that everybody can travel into the past with me and make up the stories they decide they want to: Why was this place abandoned? What happened to the former owners? What used to happen in this room? People make their own kind of answer. It makes them go into their imaginary world and become the hero of their own adventure where they are the detective. Each story will be different from one another, and that’s what I love. To me, my pictures act as a new kind of “Memento Mori”; they are here to remind us that everything has an end and that we should enjoy it while it lasts.

I don’t really count how many places I visit, but a lot for sure! It is not a race for me, I prefer to spend a lot of time in a location rather than speeding and visiting many of them. As I said, I am focusing on photography, so I can spend a lot of time waiting for the perfect light. For now, I can say I've visited a lot of countries: France, Belgium, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Portugal, Poland, Romania, Luxembourg, Italy, Namibia, and Argentina; and I plan of seeing a lot more! Kolmanskop is for sure the best place I ever visited! It was a mining town in the middle of the Namib Desert in Namibia. Driven by the huge amount of diamonds, people basically created this town out of nothing and made it a prosperous city. In 1954, diamonds started to decrease and the population moved south where a new vein had been found. It became a ghost town, and now it is completely filled with sand. I was there for a week shooting, the atmosphere is somehow unreal and magical, like time stopped there years ago.

It’s important to say that most of the work is done before to find the locations, which means a lot of time researching the place itself and its history. The internet is of course a great source of knowledge, people around you or other photographers are also a great source of news. Books can also be a big help. Once located, you need to go there, which is not that easy when you have to cross half of Europe for it! Concerning the information, it depends. Sometimes when a place is well known and accessible to everyone (like Buzludzha, for example), I write a report to explain the history of the place so that people can better understand the meaning of my photograph. So for me, this photography passion is both hobby and work as I try to make a living out of it but also because that’s what I love doing the most.

I have a few exhibitions coming up in France this year. And also have a new book getting published in November: “Green Urbex 2: the world without us” with a mix of all the places I photographed in the last ten years. Of course, I hope to continue visiting a lot of places in Europe, even if this year, I will try to focus more on further destinations. I would love to continue visiting ex-Soviet countries in the east, and I have several Asian countries I would like to explore also! Japan again, Lebanon, USA… There are so many countries I would like to visit!

I would love to underline that behind my photographs, there is also an environmental message. I wanted to show what the world would be like if humans weren’t there anymore, meaning that if we continue in this way, humanity's disappearance could be one of the consequences. That’s what I prefer working on when ivy takes over everything. We can see what the world could look like if humans disappeared from Earth. We are all fascinated by this post-apocalyptic vision. Maybe we need to be the witness of that to enjoy what we have and the time in front of us. The main thing for me is that people create their own stories when they are watching my photographs. In my book “Green Urbex, the world without us” I state Earth becomes a better place when humankind isn’t present. I take the example of Chornobyl or the border between the two Koreas to explain it: Scientists have studied and witnessed that thirty years after the explosion, the Chornobyl exclusion zone has become a haven for wildlife, with lynx, bison, deer, and other animals roaming through thick forests. It is now the third-largest nature reserve in mainland Europe and has become an iconic experiment in rewilding. The same happened in the no-man zone in Korea: Animals and plants we thought were extinct were found there by scientific crews and are thriving there without us. But for how long?