A photographic work on Geneva, time, memory, and what remains.
 
Divided by the Rhône, Geneva is a city of two banks. This book follows the same division. Rive Gauche / Rive Droite is conceived as a double-sided object, with two covers and two possible directions of reading. There is no fixed beginning, no single path through the work. The book can be entered from either side, turning the sequence into something circular rather than strictly linear.
 
This structure is not simply a reflection of the city. It is a way of thinking about time.
 
Photography has always carried a strange promise: to hold an instant still. A moment passes, yet the photograph remains. A gesture, a face, a street, a fragment of everyday life can be preserved long after the moment itself has disappeared. But the photograph does not truly stop time. It only creates the appearance of having done so.
 
The people in these photographs continue to age. The city changes. The light moves on. And the photographer, like everyone else, remains subject to the same passage of time.
 
The work is accompanied by a line from the Hávamál:
 
Cattle die.
Kinsmen die.
You yourself must die.
 
The words introduce a quiet tension between the images and the object that contains them. The photographs attempt to preserve presence; the text reminds us that nothing can ultimately be preserved. What remains is not the moment itself, but its trace.
 
By allowing the book to be read from either direction, Rive Gauche / Rive Droite deliberately breaks with the conventional forward movement of a photographic book. We can return to an image. We can begin again. We can move backwards through what has already happened.
 
Time, however, does not work that way.
 
The book can be turned over.
The photograph can be revisited.
The moment cannot.
 
Rive Gauche / Rive Droite is ultimately a book about this contradiction: the desire to hold on to what is already disappearing, and the small, imperfect resistance of photography against forgetting.
 
Numbered edition /100 
A5
60 pages
Satin paper 115gr
Satin cover 250gr
Locally printed at Imprimerie Villière, Beaumont