"Everything directly lived has receded into representation", Guy Debord announced in The Society of the Spectacle, in 1973, the year of my birth. Twenty years later my conscious photographic practice began, and I never looked back at these first images until scanning them during the sleepless nights following my daughter's birth in autumn 2017: black-and-white rolls shot at twenty with an old Pentax K1000 and a secondhand Nikon FM2 on ageing Tri-X 400 or Ilford HP5, sometimes pushed to their limit, grainy images forming a carefully set-aside photo-biography that turns out to have been at the heart of my practice all along, an intimate chamber drama unfolding mostly in the provinces, by the Saône and the slopes of the Croix-Rousse in Lyon, winter nights full of friends, self-portraits and chosen old masters.