The epidemic of the Coronavirus (Covid-19) is spreading and turning into a pandemic, hitting France along the way. On 17 March 2020 at 12 noon, confinement began in France…

Even if it’s temporary, it’s a 180-degree turn in our lives, because the key word in this confinement is “social distancing”. What a lovely expression for saying that we’re going to be isolated from those close to us: our parents and friends and all the people and things that made up our daily lives. Our plans were also going to be turned upside down: no more leisure activities, no more outings or very few, no more trips, exhibitions and shows were cancelled… We were going to be prisoners within our own four walls.
We all have a tendency to procrastinate, so I took advantage of the first few days to catch up and do all the things I’d got into the habit of putting off until tomorrow.

But that only lasted for a while and very quickly the desire to take photos returned. So I decided to resume my self-portraits, adapting them to the confinement: Since it was no longer possible to meet other people, I decided to ask them to send me a photo of themselves that I could use to make a self-portrait.
It was a way for me to meet them again, to share a moment together. In this series are close friends, friends with whom I travel or have travelled and with whom I have shared some really good times, but also people with whom I have had exchanges or simply whose photographic work I appreciate.

No Photoshop retouching to get the cut-out in front of my face. I just cut out the photo I receive after printing it out, keeping the homothetic effect, and place it in front of my face, following the instructions of the person who will be taking the photo. This time it’s my son Matisse who’s doing the job, and he’s doing pretty well. The flash settings were made and my SLR on the tripod was connected to my PC.

So there’s no retouching to make the faces match, it’s all done when the shot is taken.
For each photo I receive, I look for the best way to adapt the morphologies and expressions.

But this time, there’s a bit of staging involved, because doing several self-portraits in a row made me realise that I needed to vary the compositions to break the routine and avoid getting bored!
Once again, a big thank you to everyone who took part in this project.

The complete series is HERE