Le premier homme (the first man)

On September 12th, 2015, a friend of mine sent me a text message to catch up.

After some exchanges about our respective lives, he told me about a newspaper article he read the week before. It was about a lady in her sixties wandering around, alone in a forest, several kilometers away from her house. She stated that she had just gone through a puzzling experience: an intense white light had appeared above her head and the landscape had begun to warp in front of her disbelieving eyes.

Seized by anxiety and completely lost, the elderly woman had been found at nightfall by a lumberjack who took her immediately to the emergency room.

Obviously, nobody gave any credit to her story until one day, one of the woman’s grandchildren found a strange picture in her cellphone, proving that she had not suffered from hallucinations as everybody had thought.

Following the publication of the story in the media, several people from neighboring areas claimed they had witnessed abnormal scenes as well.

I was looking for a subject for a photo essay and I had a lot of free time in front of me. I decided to go to that aforementioned region and lead my own an investigation. I purchased a one-way airfare and packed what I needed.

After several weeks of unfruitful research, a local guy shared his thoughts with me: these inexplicable events were the work of a kind of wizard. He however had never seen him and could not prove anything. I nevertheless decided to follow this weak lead as it was the only one I had. Several months after, exhausted and disheartened, I seemed to distinguish a person in the distance. I had to wait several more months until I finally could approach him. I could never have imagined neither how dangerous it would be to find him, nor the cost of navigating in his universe.

All what I experienced by his side far exceeds my understanding and is the work of a solitary human being, deeply bound to nature.

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