Passagers

Jean Pierre Favreau

This is the first monograph on the photography of Jean Pierre Favreau and explores his vision of a man who haunts the city streets, squinting at the architecture and crossing his own private islands as if they were deserts. This project, consisting of chance meetings lasting only a moment, began in the early 1980s. His black and white and sometimes colour pictures freeze passers by during their unquiet strolls, their dreamy interludes, their intimate questionings. Harangued, apostrophized, cadenced by Laurent Mauvignier’s commentary, these photographs ring with the silence at the heart of urban mayhem, with the loneliness at the borders of light and darkness. It matters not whether the photos are of New York, the Cape Verdes, Havana, or Tokyo; everywhere man slips his moorings and “waters himself down or cancels himself out” to escape the world that surrounds him, to keep his balance. “His gaze becomes glazed and turns inside-out like a glove, towards an inner monologue,” writes Mauvignier. It is this presence/absence of people and places that pervades the photographs of Jean Pierre Favreau, like an echo of his photographer’s curiosity about the world. Passagers is an encounter between a photographer and a writer who share the same view of mankind.

Jean Pierre Favreau is a photographer and travels the world as a photojournalist, especially to the United States, Latin America, and Southeast Asia. His photographs are published in Le Monde and he has produced several special reports, one of which, on France, was the subject of an exhibition in 1992. He has been sent on various assignments on behalf of the Ministry of Culture to cover the visual arts in France, the results of which were published in 1986.
Laurent Mauvignier is a writer and his books include Loin d’eux (1999), Apprendre à finir (2000), Ceux d’à côté (2002), Seuls (2004), Le Lien (2005), Dans la foule (2006), Des hommes (2009), Ce que j’appelle oubli (2011), Tout mon amour (2012).