REQUIEM WALTZ IS A SONG BY EMILY JANE WHITE.

A natural accident multiplied by the human intervention created this zone called the Salton Sea : a sea that is way too salty to keep its creatures alive. The salt turned a whole area into a cemetery. But as chaotic and desperate as they are, Salton landscapes are still amazingly beautiful.  

Poindexter used to say that chaos is what happens when an angel falls in love with a demon. Wandering around feels like being a witness of this love story.

I built this series around three ideas :

- I wanted to show the ground, because the first thing I felt was an unknown feeling under my shoes : indeed, bones are the ground.
- I wanted to show the beauty of the landscape and the remaining life through the presence of a few animals. I tried to make a portrait of an abandoned land as a desolated eden.
- I always travel with toys. It's a way to play everywhere and to turn landscape photography into something else. I put my little travelers in the landscape as usual : some of them seem to remind us that we're in a cemetery; some of them look lost, and I guess they are always an invitation to imagine another world.

I called the series Salton Waltz because of a song by Emily Jane White called Requiem Waltz. 

Oh the sweetest mark upon your list
Is your own seductive oh death wish
And God above no interventionist
Stands as you're strangled by the devil's fist

Eros and Thanatos are probably the refrain of my whole work as a writer and as a photographer, as humans are capable of the best and the worst, and after all... there's no life without death, nor Thanatos without Eros...



A part of the series was exhibited in Paris in 2014 and 2016 and will be exhibited in London at the Oxo Tower for the Cluster Print and Photography Fair, in November 2024.