Marc often photographed water, the water of streams and rivers rather than that of the sea, as if, for him, the image of water was the one he had known in his childhood home in the Haut Beaujolais. It was a country of rivers and woods and so, thereafter, all during his voyages, he had photographed what had always been part of his interior landscape. Among his photos where water is present, I chose this one of a woman washing her laundry as she squats on a log lying across the branch of a river, no doubt a little tributary of the Mékong. Looking at this photo, one dreams the water as much as one sees it, one imagines it warm, soft, silty, ready to envelope and caress, to carry, to soothe. And the woman’s gestures, so graceful, have the same fluidity, the same slowness, the same softness as the current of the water itself. For me this photograph is at once a portrait of Marc and an image of his love of women, of femininity, of the feeling of love as he sees it, capable of carrying, of enveloping, of transporting, of being forever reborn, like water that flows on without ever running out.

For a photographer, water also contains the charm of reflection, and the image projected on the surface gives it a visual rhyme that intensifies its charm. A while ago I realized that the shadow that appears on the water is already an indication of the shadows of evening that will come to darken this corner of the river, but I also see, a little further down in the background, the little boy standing in his dinghy in a kind of an eddy of water splashed with light. And for me, the whitewater, cascading and singing like its own freshness and gaiety, also mirrors Marc’s personality, melancholy at times, like cloudy waters, but also so joyous and youthful in his passions, his curiosity, his ardor.

 

Catherine Chaine
2015