TITLE: PILGRIMAGE

I started this series without knowing it was going to be a series. I took photos during my visits to Arles, on the sidelines of the worshops in which I participated.
What strikes, of course, any visitor, whether novice or connoisseur of this city, are the important traces of the past. And that’s what interests me, the traces of the past. The traces of the past on the city of Arles, recent or old, the traces of my past on what constitutes me now. It’s obsessive. Understanding where we come from, where I come from. Understanding the influence of the past on the present. For this understanding we only have are our memory, the filter of our memory which selects and distorts but also the tangible traces worn by time.
I continued this series for 3 years, like a pilgrimage in the city, like a mystical search for signs from before or from elsewhere. Steps, steps, more steps, sounds of footsteps, of my footsteps in the streets and paths, footsteps of people who are no longer there. I tried to see, to feel, to listen to what they had to tell us. It was also the opportunity for an inner pilgrimage to encounter children's fears, the smell of wet earth, rough bark, strange animals.... I set off to explore the geological strata stacked one after the other. on the others, marks from another time that we could not reconstruct exactly. What I have reconstructed in this series is only my my interpretation of this past.

AUTHOR: fany magna (France)

I was born in 1977. I am a teacher, and I "only" discovered photography at the age of 30, after a romantic breakup and a need to rebuild myself. I have been working part-time for several years to give myself time for photographic creation, writing and drawing.

My images address the themes of memory and forgetting, traces of childhood and family ties. There emerges a certain melancholy and strangeness. Identity and strangeness to oneself are also quite present in my creation.
My photographs are sometimes accompanied by prose texts and cut-ups that I keep in notebooks. My inspiration comes of course from my experiences but also from authors like Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Patti Smith for their quest for freedom in their lives and their writing. But also women writers and poets like Diane Di Prima and Léonore Kandel. My references in photography are Martin Bogren and Paolo Nozolino with whom I had the chance to work during workshops, but also Klavdij Sluban, Dolores Marat, Antoine d’Agata, Francesca Woodman…. Many more...