Héritage
Recreating a sense of human connection in a world increasingly centred around screens.
It is grounded in meeting, conversation, and the passing on of knowledge and experience.
I set out to meet people from different generations, inviting them to share a message or a lesson life had taught them.
Approaching strangers in the street, especially older people, is not always easy, yet these moments of exchange often turn out to be deeply genuine and meaningful.
Differences in age, life experience, and generation give rise to a variety of perspectives, sometimes even conflicting ones.
Each conversation is accompanied by a photographic portrait, as a lasting trace of the encounter.
This project is infused with a personal nostalgia for eras I never knew.
Among all the encounters captured, four portraits were selected for the strength of their message and what they express about the bond between generations.
Milla
I’m originally from Brazil, and I’ve been living in France for years. I’m an environmental engineer, and I came here to do my master’s degree.
I think what life has truly taught me is to trust myself and to realise that I’m capable of doing things I never even imagined.
So far, at 28, my experience has shown me that you have to work for what you want in life.
Michel
I was born in 1942, and I’ve seen all the changes in culture and everything else. Back then, people worked with horses; now it’s tractors.
We used to walk to school. Sometimes there were 30 centimetres of snow and it was minus 20 degrees. Some people walked 3 or 4 kilometres — now they all go by car.
Back then, there was no television, and people came together more easily: they played cards, talked, sang. Things have changed a lot, yeah.
Here, in this village, during the war, people resisted. There were resistance fighters, like everywhere else… what do you want me to tell you, they were burned in the church.
I was already working as a mechanic at 14 — I had to bring money home. I used to walk about twenty kilometres to get to work, and with the snow in winter, it wasn’t easy. It all started in 1956, and in 1973 I finally set up my own garage, just down the street, at the crossroads.
Nicole
I was born in 1960. We’re the generation that has seen the most change. We saw the arrival of television, mobile phones, and computers, and today we use them all the time, but we never imagined we would witness so many changes in one lifetime.
I’ve always loved nature, but these days we don’t leave enough room for it. When I was young, I remember car windscreens covered in insects, and now there are so many fewer of them. We are destroying our natural world, and it’s such a shame. We were lucky not to have known war or repression, and yet this is the kind of world we are leaving to our children and grandchildren.
When I was little, I wanted a job connected to the outdoors, because I didn’t want to be shut away in an office. So straight away I thought of becoming a PE teacher. It seemed like a good way to be outside. My parents refused and forbade me to do it, because they said it was a job for men. In the end, I trained in sales, but I had to stop when I had my first child , I was 19. I wanted a child, it was my choice, and it happened very quickly.
I wanted to go to HEC, but I was only able to do the preparatory course. After that, I sold all sorts of things, which allowed me to be outside and not have a boss constantly looking over my shoulder. I even had a small carpentry business , we sold verandas and included the installation. Unfortunately, we sold it to dishonest people who never paid us. We had to file for bankruptcy, but we bounced back.
Today, I know what I love. I’m retired now, and I make the most of it by spending a lot of time outdoors. Much later, when I met my husband, I realised that being an agricultural engineer would have allowed me to work in nature and around animals. If I had known about that path when I was 18, it is probably what I would have chosen.
We had far less information than people do now. Back then, the options seemed to be accountant, teacher, and everything felt very narrowly defined. The jobs that appealed to me were all considered men’s jobs. In fact, when I looked into it 30 years ago and was accepted into the school that would finally have allowed me to do what I wanted, there was a three-month logging placement deep in the forest. There was no placement reserved or adapted for women, so I couldn’t go.
Being expected to share the same cabin, the same showers, and the same room with three or four men, I decided not to take the risk. It remains one of my great regrets. It’s a shame I would have loved it, but that was how things were.
Xavier
I was born in 1956. I had a somewhat unusual childhood, because from the age of ten onwards, I no longer knew my father. I was not even told that he had died, at the time, it was kept from me. Psychologically, it left a mark: I have no memories from before I was ten.
Because there is a ten-year gap between me and my brothers, who are older, I grew up with a woman on her own who had no real training, apart from singing and painting. So I found myself having to take on the role of the man of the house. I became a little adult very quickly, and I realised that what mattered most to me was leaving Saint-Étienne, because life there felt very backwards.
I was interested in the way the world was changing, and I fed that curiosity through Anglo-Saxon music on the radio. I really did know the old world no speed limits, no seatbelts , and so I adapted as things changed, quite quickly, because I was faced with modern life head-on.
I began by studying accountancy, and as a child it never appealed to me, so I changed direction and went to business school. Through the people I met, I gradually came to realise that France was all very well, but there was so much more elsewhere. I travelled a great deal and eventually chose the United States. My school had a partnership with a school in New York, Columbia, so I went there. The first few nights were difficult: I had to sleep in a shelter for homeless people. All sorts of things happened to me, I was ripped off by a taxi driver who charged me double… well, life, really.
I tried to stay in the United States, but I had to come back to France to do my military service — I had no choice. It lasted a year, and that was when I came face to face with the whole of French society. There was no real social hierarchy there; we were all treated the same. Some of them could neither read nor write. It was strange for me to realise that there were people living lives completely different from mine, people who had never had the chance or the possibility to study or even go to school. It was a real revelation for me. I was 22 or 23.
After that, I held fairly important positions. I ended my working life in an estate agency that I created with my wife and son.
I love creating, that is my signature. I adapt very quickly, and building relationships with employees, getting messages across… I have always had very strong social skills, and I brought something to people. That opened many doors for me, including eventually becoming the director of a bank branch, even though I had never worked in a bank. I was really put there to solve a social problem. It is not the product that matters, but the way you manage things and the way you communicate information to the people around you.
When I was young and had just lost my father, I was not supposed to speak. Life was not the same as it is today; people cared far less, or not at all , about what children were going through emotionally and mentally. For me, it was simply: “be quiet, that’s how it is.” A child had no say. At 11 or 12, I found myself dealing with notaries, having to sell my father’s outdated possessions. I also pushed my mother to move to Lyon, because life in Saint-Étienne was truly difficult. When reality hit me at 11, 12, 13, I had to learn a great many things on my own. And when I turned 18, I “escaped” , to get away from all of it and to build my own life.
Lyon allowed me to grow a great deal in that respect. I was lucky enough to travel often to England. I visited many places and saw many things.
I am not jealous of the openness and access to information that you have now, but I do think it is a shame, because things have become distorted. For example, I went to Florence, which is the most beautiful place for art that I have seen in my life, but if I went back now, I know the museums would be packed and we would struggle to really see and enjoy the experience properly. With the level of visibility we have today, we no longer have that same surprise of discovering a place for ourselves when we travel. There are many fascinating things we see on social media, the openness is incredible.
People matter deeply. Human beings are a living, fascinating material. You need to know how to communicate, and how to shape people and their conversations with respect.
I am not in favour of social media. I find it very false and very superficial.
