“It is preferable not to travel with a dead man.” Henri Michaux

Paris, the beginning of summer 1995, I just got the results of my Baccalauréat littéraire (en: literary Baccalaureate)  I’m through to the next round and next chapter of my life, university. Excited? Not hugely, as I had picked a field of study for no other reason than the “necessity” of holding some sort of degree. It was a weird blend of linguistics, and other things known back then as LLCE… High-school had been a rollercoaster ride of rock-n-roll, punk, grunge, skateboarding, friend’s suicides and reflections on Albert Camus’ “absurd”, terrible paintings, slightly better drawings, and eye roll inducing poetry, and a brain somewhat fried by the 8 hours philosophy per week imposed on French literature high school students…

I had a cinema student pass in hand and time to kill, after buying a record (I believe it was the new PJ Harvey album), I headed off to UGC Odeon cinema got myself a seat for a matinee session of Dead Man, Jim Jarmusch’s black and white period piece, exploring the themes of voyage, death, purgatory and staring Johnny Depp. It was 11 am and I was alone in the cinema, I had not read up on it, but had watched Stranger than Paradise and Down By Law before and loved them…

There’s really no other way to describe what happened: my mind was blown… From the stunning black and white cinematography by Robby Müller, to Depp’s acting, Neil Young’s trance-like soundtrack, William Blake’s grandiose poetry, a hilarious cameo by Iggy Pop, the film got me on every level… I was transfixed, in shock and there and then knew I had to live my life through creating images… 

Bit of a dilemma really, as I had enrolled and been accepted into the wrong field now… But that soon lost its importance as the French system of university studies has some annoying and hilarious quirks to it that turned out to be my saving grace. You see, we had “options obligatoires” literally, compulsory options… Ah France… Anyway, I took a lot of these options, most memorable was Documentary Film Making taught by a completely mad but brilliant professor with whom I eventually drove around the whole of Ireland in my final year for a Uni film project, and got drunk on Bushmills with hardcore republican 80 year olds in Belfast, who threw us out because I had mentioned a “classic Irish song” that was actually written by an English man (oops) “Feck off… That’s not oirish!” Dom is now a good friend and attends my openings in Paris. (There’s definitely a most entertaining blog piece coming on that Irish trip of ours…) There was also History of Cinema and Photography, taught by a somewhat snobby and strict but very passionate man, who happened to be personal friends of Stanley Kubrick and John Boorman. Us meeting Kubrick never happened because he died a month before that was meant to have happened, but he did bring us Boorman and we got to see his brilliant film The General in his presence.  I also got to show Boorman my first ever exhibition (on Ireland), which featured one of my first sets of (obviously brilliantly mounted) darkroom hand prints falling off a panel as I showed them to him… He did say he liked my images from Belfast though (one of which was on the floor at the time)…  

I had also gotten membership at the Uni’s darkroom and took a printing course with a very flamboyant French-Vietnamese fashion photographer… After getting yelled at multiple times for wasting chemicals I was eventually put on the list of us few who were allowed to use the dark room after hours and on holidays, I ended up spending pretty much all my spare time holed up in there. In the end I paid way more attention to these “options” than the main curriculum, scraped through the course, got my bachelors degree, enrolled for a masters but never turned up… All the while, I was saving money to buy pro gear by working as a translator, teacher and bilingual telesales operator, working on mind numbing projects like giving support to IT professionals on things I had no understanding of, such as 3D design software; answering with the not at all generic name of John Smith (ah the advantages of being French/British).  

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Anyway, I made that cash and I went straight off to London to kick-start my career shooting freelance for Sygma, the French agency and working at a hotel reception part time so as to afford silly London rents… It was a blast, energy levels were very high and working these long hours made perfect sense… Over the course of my career so far, came many moments where I wondered if this choice, to be a photographer, was indeed the right one. But re-watching Dead Man or even just editing work while listening to the soundtrack, was and is always a good reminder as to why I could not consider doing anything else, at least for now… In short, Mr Jarmusch I thank you for this masterpiece!

To be continued…

“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.”

― William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell