“La foule”* is a series I took at an open air electronic music concert in Nantes in September 2021 on a sunny Sunday afternoon in a park near the Loire River.

During that period the health restrictions due to covid were less drastic and we could meet without masks as long as we were vaccinated. So people were happy to be able to meet again in such events. They were dancing and smiling.

There was a peaceful and joyful ambience.

This environment was for me the perfect context to try to approach a crowd from a subjective point of view in a quite close distance focusing on individualities and working on portraits.

For me, the challenge of this series was to bear witness to the atmosphere that prevailed at that time and place. Particularly after a long period during which meetings were restricted and these kinds of moments were very rare.

But how do you convey this kind of atmosphere in photography?

For this, I decided to treat the crowd not as a unity, a totality, but as an incomplete collection of individualities and personalities. I chose the subjective point of view. For the challenge was to capture something of the life that occurs in one-to-one relationships in encounters in the crowd.

My principle was not to turn to the stage, but to the public.
To do this, I had to adopt a different posture from that which generally consists of a photographer standing back and excluding himself from the situation.
So I joined the party. This is how I collected these beautiful attitudes and these many eye-contacts.

The choice of Black & White was obvious to unify the series and to focus the interest on the essential.

*La foule is a song performed by Édith Piaf in 1957. The lyrics are by Michel Rivgauche and the music by Ángel Cabral.

Born in Nantes in 1978, Aurélien developed a taste and interest for the arts at an early stage. He is a clinical psychologist.

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