As part of a public commission in Cherbourg, I became interested in how young adolescents from southern Morocco, newly settled in the Provinces neighborhood of Cherbourg-Octeville, navigated the city. What urban routes did they take to the city center? How did they view the Place du Théâtre, the statue of Napoleon, the gardens and collections of the Emmanuel Liais museum?

These itineraries examine the nature of a place: what is a square or a monument? They also raise the question of hospitality. The hospitality of the city of Cherbourg but also of my own photographic practice. I imagined a photographic device where the images taken were not entrenched in the camera but fully reflected in the public space. I built a reflective box, a mirror-chamber, with which I roved the streets of Cherbourg and in front of which passerby were invited to pose as they would for an itinerant studio. This device offered immediate compensation to the people photographed by reflecting their own image at them. The portraits taken were nothing more than images derived from images that were already reflected in the public space. Photographs without primacy, whose negatives will never, as it were, have entered the camera, nor been put in the chamber.