Desillusion Utopia was born from a late understanding. For years I believed I was documenting skateboarding and surfing. I thought I was telling the story of practices and performances and scenes. With time I realised that neither I nor Desillusion had ever truly been there for the sport. What drew me from the beginning was the sensitivity that grows out of a singular relationship to the world. What I was looking for in the streets and empty pools was never the technical gesture. It was the way the city reshapes those who move through it. What I was searching for in the ocean was not the perfect wave. It was that almost spiritual relationship to a living force that shapes a human being from within.
The skaters and surfers I photographed carried something unique. They moved through the world in a different way. They had a way of inhabiting the street or the sea that created a vision of reality no one else possessed. I thought I was following them. In truth I was already trying to understand myself through them.
Today with Desillusion Utopia this quest has shifted. I am no longer just a witness to the way others live. I have become the space of the experience. I walk and travel and get lost and change. I inhabit the world as they once did, not to accomplish a feat but to let each place redraw the way I feel.
This book gathers these transformations. It tells how the road and the light and the fatigue and the doubt and the joy become a lived form of poetry. It also carries the figures who embodied this way of being, sometimes without knowing it. Tony Alva in L.A., Dan Pascacio in Mexico, the Sufi in turkey, The Amazigh in Sahara and Ethan Lau in Hawaii and many others. People who tried to make their life a form of poetry. People who showed me that an existence can become a work.
Desillusion Utopia is not a book about what I saw. It is a book about what the world has done to me. It is a continuation of what Desillusion has always been without ever naming it. An invitation to look at life as a living matter that shapes us if we allow ourselves to surrender to it.
Desillusion Utopia - Attempt One
Format : 32 cm by 42 cm
100 loose folio pages
Comes with the New New Adventurer booklet - 64 pages
Includes one Desillusion sticker sheet
Desillusion Utopia was born from a late understanding. For years I believed I was documenting skateboarding and surfing. I thought I was telling the story of practices and performances and scenes. With time I realised that neither I nor Desillusion had ever truly been there for the sport. What drew me from the beginning was the sensitivity that grows out of a singular relationship to the world. What I was looking for in the streets and empty pools was never the technical gesture. It was the way the city reshapes those who move through it. What I was searching for in the ocean was not the perfect wave. It was that almost spiritual relationship to a living force that shapes a human being from within.
The skaters and surfers I photographed carried something unique. They moved through the world in a different way. They had a way of inhabiting the street or the sea that created a vision of reality no one else possessed. I thought I was following them. In truth I was already trying to understand myself through them.
Today with Desillusion Utopia this quest has shifted. I am no longer just a witness to the way others live. I have become the space of the experience. I walk and travel and get lost and change. I inhabit the world as they once did, not to accomplish a feat but to let each place redraw the way I feel.
This book gathers these transformations. It tells how the road and the light and the fatigue and the doubt and the joy become a lived form of poetry. It also carries the figures who embodied this way of being, sometimes without knowing it. Tony Alva in L.A., Dan Pascacio in Mexico, the Sufi in turkey, The Amazigh in Sahara and Ethan Lau in Hawaii and many others. People who tried to make their life a form of poetry. People who showed me that an existence can become a work.
Desillusion Utopia is not a book about what I saw. It is a book about what the world has done to me. It is a continuation of what Desillusion has always been without ever naming it. An invitation to look at life as a living matter that shapes us if we allow ourselves to surrender to it.
Desillusion Utopia - Attempt One
Format : 32 cm by 42 cm
100 loose folio pages
Comes with the New New Adventurer booklet - 64 pages
Includes one Desillusion sticker sheet
