The Master's House (1989)

In 1989, equipped with a Sinar 4×5-inch view camera and restricted to six exposures per outing, I embarked on an urban series which, by chance, led me to a villa concealed behind high walls, its garden gate deliberately left ajar by the developers to invite vandalism and hasten its decay. Once the residence of a prominent textile family from northern France, it had been abandoned following the sale of its production tools and the dismissal of its workforce, leaving behind a region deeply scarred by deindustrialisation. Inside, only bare walls and gutted shells remained, imbued with a spectral presence, while in the courtyard, a copper beech with strikingly architectural branches seemed to embody the new master of the place, a silent guardian of the history of generations past. These images, a formative milestone in my photographic journey, reveal both the austere beauty of ruins and the social memory they carry.