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"In my time I have seen a hundred craftsmen and a hundred workmen wiser and happier than any university don."
Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533 - 1592)
I made this series of photographs around the given theme : Bordeaux and the Bordelais – Eating, drinking, thinking. I put this photographic project under the auspices of Montaigne who was a philospher, Mayor of Bordeaux, humanist, aristocrat and farmer. Montaigne was close to the earth, ideas and power. He was interested in people without making social distinctions, unusual for that time. In his work Essays he praises individual liberty and the right to happiness, regardless of social or financial success.
Around Langon in the Bordeaux region, I in turn met my contempory humanists : fishermen, wine makers, lumberjacks and land owners. We spoke and I photographed them. Living in Europe and in France which continually evolves towards a modern and uniform state, the people that feature in this work struggle to maintain their livelihoods which respect the past and the environment. Aristocrats or not, they live a life close to nature, to humanity and to a time which runs at its own rythm.
André and Jean-Luc Beaucaillou (son and father) in their kitchen holding respectively a carp and an aloze which they caught earlier in the day in the Garonne river near by. They are crop and cattle farmers, but during the summer they also fish for aloze fish which come up the Garonne river from the sea to lay their eggs and die.