This is the text which our friend Jim, who in a recent letter to us, in his inventory of missing texts, asked me to write before the launch of our new website. What more can I say that I didn't say in the various introductions?
Perhaps, it is with the Tandem series that everything started for us, at least photographically speaking. Although it contains more than just the portraits of our hosts (more than half of the diptychs include them), we think that it should be grouped with the other two series (Hosts of Chile and Hosts of France) since it was the atmosphere of proximity and naturalness which, we were told, marked the people that caused this work to be shown several times in France (Toulouse, Perpignan, Gaillac).
Without being too long-winded, these first images intended for family and friends were presented to a larger public thanks to a combination of circumstances. It so happens that while we were preparing a small slide show with a friend from Albi ("The Voice"), we showed it to a friend of the miss in Toulouse (Vincent). This person, more familiar with computers and photo and sound editing, had as a neighbor a professional photographer (Benoît). One day Vincent showed Benoît the first part of the slideshow (there was only one part in fact because one evening with our friend Hssine, without intending to, we sent everything directly to the trash--that is to say about twenty minutes--and of course we had not secured anything!) And Benoît proposed to submit a selection of images to the jury of a photo festival in Toulouse of which he was one of the organizers.
Later one day when I had returned to my nursing job and the miss was looking to start or take over a bookstore, I remember the very encouraging reaction of our friend Jim from Canada who came to see us when we presented the series to him. I regret that I forgot about this work when I started to take up photography, when it had become clear that for the moment we could only dream of being independent booksellers since all our attempts had failed, and not only for financial reasons...
As anyway during the reports in Spain I would not have been able to make many photos of guests since I was sleeping in the trunk of the old Citroën GS inherited from my grandmother, although I would have been able to make some in Florida and in Georgia, and especially during the long journey by bicycle of 8 months in West Africa where every evening I pitched my tent or my mat provided with a mosquito netting in the villages and at peoples' homes. The welcome was often extraordinary but there will be no testimony of it apart from our memories and the logbook that I kept.
It wasn't until I was halfway through the French cycling trip that I got back into the habit of taking souvenir photos of my overnight hosts. When we submitted that last gallery to Jim for his opinion, I was very surprised by his enthusiasm. And from his return email I learned that the famous sociologist and anthropologist Marcel Mauss had written a lot about the issue of hospitality. A lot of very interesting things have been written on the subject and it is not our intention here to play the pedant if we want to, but we encourage you to do some research! Because asking questions about hospitality and its opposite will be very useful in the times to come...
PS: In this text, we have mentioned friends who helped us at that time and we would also like to mention others like Sergio, Danny Dee, Coach Thierry, Tirman, our two Moms, Fabien, Nicolas, Coach Francis, M'sieur Manu, Ptit Père, Amos and Laurent who, at one time or another in our journey to reach this new website, gave us a hand!