Guillaume and the Mediterranean
Guillaume Letestu is one of the last three fishermen left in the small, touristic and residential town of Cassis on the French Riviera, half an hour South of Marseille.
Guillaume wasn't always a fisherman, actually he was born in the North of France and arrived in Cassis for the first time with his parents when he was just five. He lived in Cassis until he was seventeen when he moved to Paris to play rock and roll with his band. After six years playing music in Paris, he went back to Cassis with almost no money and started working with Djamal (one of the other fishermen left in Cassis), learning how to fish. But he had not papers to work on Djamal's boat so he moved to a small island in Brittany to work for a Chinese enterprise that repaired sails and built ropes and splice systems.
During the next years he travelled all around the world building splice systems for different nautical companies. After a while, he returned to Paris and started working in circuses, at the Opera and for events where people needed to have security fly systems. Finally, he founded a company called La Linea and worked there for five years. When the crisis hit France in 2008, he decided to go back to Cassis and go back to school to get the license that would allow him to be a fisherman.
Guillaume lives in Cassis with his partner Berengere and their two daughters. He says that: "Fishing is like playing music. To put the net and pull it with fishes is an ode to hope and life; an hymn to freedom".
This series was realized during the Spring 2015 while I was an Artist-in-Residence at The Camargo Foundation in Cassis.