This series emerged during the pandemic, when distance became the condition of every body in the world. Skin, which is the body's first and most vulnerable threshold, could no longer be reached. Travel collapsed. Studios closed. The ways nude art photography had been practiced for decades — in groups, in shared spaces, with the intimacy of near proximity — all stopped at once.Tu es le seul à être proche, quand tout est loin was made in that suspended time. It is the pandemic chapter of Ecotone, the long-form series on the body and the natural environment. What changes here is the emotional register. Where Ecotone places the body among horses, trees, blossoms, and water as an ecosystem in which the human is one element, this sub-series places the body alone — sitting, crouched, curled, turned away — on a narrow strip of dark sand where the land meets the water and nothing else enters the frame.The landscape here is minimal to the point of abstraction: wet shore, small waves, a thin horizon. No trees, no architecture, no visible weather, no other people. The body has the whole frame to itself but is small within it — pushed toward the corner, sometimes barely legible against the darker sand. What the images record is not the body in nature but the body's distance from nature. The wave is close; the water is close; the earth is close. Everything else is far away.The title is taken from the emotional structure of that period. During the pandemic, the people who were still physically close became almost unbearably close; everything outside the domestic perimeter was withdrawn into screens. The closeness in the title is not a comfort. It is a fact about proximity under constraint: when the world recedes, whatever remains at arm's reach becomes the whole of experience.The figures are photographed from the back, from a distance, and at moments of stillness rather than gesture. The refusal of the face is deliberate. These are not portraits of a specific subject; they are studies of the condition of being alone with a body, beside water, at a moment when this was one of the few forms of encounter still available. The black and white tonal range holds the images in a register that is more austere than the colour registers of Ecotone's earlier work.The sub-series developed across a single extended period and remains its own coherent cycle within Ecotone. It has not been reopened since.Works from the Series
Black and white photographs made in-camera, without staging or post-production intervention.
