Le Petit Souffle - 2023

Le Petit Souffle is a project about the fishermen of Normandy, about their work and their comunnity. My images are an intimate point of view and a pure portrait of these people, a love letter dedicated to their resistance. Photographing the life on the boat of the fishermen of Honfleur and Trouville, I’ve understood how much fishing, like few other human activities, manages to combine the spiritual and manual aspect of work. Norman fishermen often stay days in the sea. From October to March they fish for saint jacques shells, from April to September, after a period of maintenance of the boats, they look for fish. Today there are several factors that test the love and the obsession of fishermen for this work: the spread of industrial fishing, the increase of the price of the fuel, the problems related to Brexit, the project to build wind turbines where there are fishing routes. Around fishing lives a community that shares joys and sorrows, expectations and efforts, farewells and reunions, but above all the same unique experience of spending the existence at sea, welcoming the sunrise and the falling of the night.