Dépouiller is a photobook in the making which merges documentary
photography with fiction writing. It navigates a city during two different
timelines, through the eyes and the words of two polar observers:
a father and a son who almost never met.


Dépouiller is an attempt to examine how the urban and the familial shape
one another. It argues that our relationship to one informs the other, through
joined processes of construction and deconstruction, familiarity and
estrangement, attachment and indifference, stability and precariousness.

   


The inquiry at the book’s foundation is fatherhood and memory making
and unmaking in cities undergoing rapid and irreversible urban transformation.
Cities remade so thoroughly that the version a father knew no longer exists in the
version a son encounters. The notebook is both a material object and a figure for
this condition: fragmentary, damaged, written in a language that requires translation,
describing streets and buildings and people that may or may not still be there.

Dépouiller takes that process of inheritance and loss as its structural principle.
Marseille is implicitly where it takes place, yet the format and the narrative
is constructed to allow it to be read through any city.







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