For many years, your practice seemed to stem from a need to go out into the world, to move through different places, to photograph. Today, I have the sense that this need has shifted into the darkroom. Has the setting of your research changed, or has what you are searching for changed?

I hope I am the one who has changed. I do not like repetition; I admire artists who have the courage to radically transform themselves. I am fascinated by the unexpected. Years ago, I stopped carrying my camera around with me. When I lived in New York, it was constantly slung over my shoulder, until I realised that, even though I continued to encounter unexpected things, I was tending to repeat the same research. So I forbade myself from carrying it, and that decision still holds today. It coincided with the birth of “Harmony of Chaos”. The negatives came from the world outside, but the final works were born in the darkroom. I realised that this restriction was not simply a way of avoiding repetition. It had become a necessity: a way of searching more deeply within what I already had, through the one constant connecting it all: myself.

It seems to me that you are now far less interested in producing new images than in understanding what the ones you have already created might still become. What fascinates you about remaining in the past?

Finding an unexpected future. The Shanghai project remained untouched for seven years, without ever becoming a book or an exhibition. Then my French gallerist, Bigaignon, looked at it and said, “Go back to it, but take it further.” I worked on it intensely that night and realised that what I had created needed to exist on a two-metre scale. Revisiting the past was something I could do at that particular point in my life. That does not mean I now constantly draw on old material to build something new from it, but at the time it changed the way I thought about my work. I was no longer interested in going somewhere in order to tell the story of that place, but in creating something that came from within me, rather than from the place itself. It is a direction that feels truer to who I am and, precisely for that reason, more universal. To me, that is the circle of intimate distance I continue to pursue in my work.

What bothers you about colour?

I find colour more aggressive. We see the world in colour, whereas I am trying to distance myself from reality. For me, photography is a necessity, that is how it began, and black and white was the most immediate response. On a subconscious level, it allows me to move further away from reality. My mentor, Ralph Gibson, used to say that whether you shoot in black and white or in colour, in most cases you reduce reality in scale, taking it from three dimensions to two. But when you remove colour, you move one step further away from it. That is what fascinates me: not reality itself, but its dreamlike dimension, the desire, dream, everything that belongs to perception. The absence of colour allows me to create that space. A black-and-white photograph will endure forever.

You have described déjà vu as a disruption in perception, a moment when time and reality begin to shift. Why do you continue to seek that state? What is it about reality that you do not like?

The issue is not reality itself, but what a work of art is capable of expressing. To me, the reality created by an artist is more real than reality itself. It is more absolute, more universal and more enduring than the actual moment. I am drawn to the way reality is perceived and to the emotional vertigo that perception can create. Déjà vu is one of the most powerful experiences I have ever had. When it happens while you are awake or half asleep, it is not a dream, but a neurological shock. You no longer know whether what you are experiencing has already happened. Years ago, I would sometimes stop taking my epilepsy medication because I missed those moments. It is overwhelming. That same distortion of reality also led me to the photograph of the jumping man. When I look at it, I think of waking in the middle of the night and not knowing whether you are still dreaming. Your vision is blurred and objects lose their outlines. That is why I removed every reference to reality. You cannot tell whether the man is jumping, flying or falling. Twelve years later, I understood why I felt so deeply connected to that photograph. I saw myself in it. It was me. Blurred, disconnected from reality. It was the fullest expression of what photography means to me and what I draw from it: finding myself again. Every photograph is bound to me in ways that are almost demonic.

The darkroom demands almost surgical precision. A fraction of a second can change everything. How much of what you do is technique, and how much is instinct?

One hundred percent technique and one hundred percent instinct. Technique is fundamental, but only so that it can be pushed beyond its limits. When it comes to chemistry, there is no room for error. Everything that comes before that is open to interpretation. The darkroom is a sacred place. It is a place of origin. It is where you take reality and write a vision, a testament, something that cannot be repeated. It is alchemy. It is magic. Sometimes I am the magician, and at other times I am the one watching the trick unfold. It also teaches you respect. The slightest trace of moisture can ruin hours of work. The wrong dilution can compromise everything, and often you only realise it afterwards. You become aware of the physical nature of things. It is as far removed from the digital as possible, and as close to the human as you can get. You have to move at the pace of the darkroom. It does not move at yours. You have to respect its time and its silence. I depend on it and I worship it, becoming its slave. Sometimes I control it, but always with its consent.

Everyone sees your darkroom as a physical place. I wonder whether, even before you enter it, there is another one within you that no one can see.

I am the first darkroom, sacred and profane, for both myself and my work. I do not mean that poetically. I mean it in the only way I can. When I see an image taking shape before my eyes, I tend to visualise how I will transform it through light and chemistry. Because of the way I work, I feel that shooting digitally always creates a need to update something. When I work with analogue photography, what I need to update is the most complex thing of all, something that cannot be found online: myself. The darkroom shows me the way. It is the difference between photographing what you see and photographing what you feel. Digital and analogue. Numerical and human.

For the SHOT project, we worked together on the contact sheets of one of the most important photographs of your career, the jumping man. The mistakes were not removed, but became part of the work. What is your relationship with the way an error remains?

We move through different stages in our lives. The fact that I made those photographs in 2013 and later turned them into a book does not mean the work has to remain fixed in that form, or that the mistakes I made then must always remain mistakes. We change, and with us changes the way we look at what we have created. I have lived through experiences that now allow me to see nuances I could not see then. Publishing a contact sheet is an act of honesty. It reveals the mistakes, but above all the process that led to the final image. When we worked on the contact sheets together, I found myself retracing the path that had brought me to that photograph. I wondered how I would take it today. It would probably be different. But thankfully, that photograph exists. I hold on to the past because it is part of who we are. I have boxes of prints, contact sheets and negatives of people who have profoundly shaped my life, and I have not yet found my own way into them. I know they are there. I also know the right moment will come, when something within me has changed. A file can be deleted. A negative cannot. Even when it breaks your heart, it remains. To me, a contact sheet is the musical score of that moment. I know exactly what I was listening to. I have never taken a photograph without music. I need to know how I will feel five seconds from now. Music is the metronome. That is why I see the contact sheet as a musical score, one that reveals the rhythm with which every image was born.

Do you feel the need to change? Are you searching for something that can take you further?

Of course. Placing the photograph of the jumping man beside one of the Shanghai buildings helps me understand what my photography is. You have to evolve and follow your own natural flow. Mine is so extreme that it has led me to epilepsy and to the destruction of many things, yet I still respect it. I want photography to remain a deeply personal experience, while also pushing it into experimentation. But it must always return to the same place. It has to be physical. It has to hurt me in some way to feel true. I need to look at a photograph and feel that pain, which is present in most of my images, but expressed with as much elegance as possible.

Have you ever lacked courage?

No.

Who are you when you are truly yourself, when you are alone?

Usually, I am somewhere between depression and being at peace with myself. The two exist in harmony and arise from the same necessity. When something comes from necessity, you do not spend too much time thinking about why or how you do it. You act instinctively. That is where the photograph of the jumping man comes from. It is an overwhelming vortex. It is the same with riding my motorcycle. When I accelerate, I find a moment of calm because it pulls me away from everything that fills my days. In that moment, I can detach myself. I feel released from what holds me captive every day: photography.

Do you ever feel overwhelmed by your own life?

Every day, because every day I push myself beyond the limit. At five in the morning, after spending twenty hours on the same print, you get the timing wrong by a single second and, for a moment, you think you might keep it anyway. Then you start again, knowing there are still hours ahead of you. That is where I find a strength I cannot find anywhere else in my life. It is excess, frustration, exhaustion. And ultimately, to the rest of the world, it is completely pointless. No one cares whether I spend twenty hours in the darkroom. But I have lived my entire life this way. I always have to prove something to myself. It becomes an obsession.

What still moves you about what you do?

Love. The older I get, the more connected I feel to my work. When I was twenty, I took photographs without knowing anything, and that was beautiful. Today, working in the darkroom is just as beautiful because I know myself better and I understand where a photograph comes from.

There is something deeply poignant about that awareness, for many reasons. I am curious to discover which photograph will be the next t o hold that kind of value for me. I know I am not an easy person, and I wonder whether I will ever get there, or whether overthinking it will stop it from happening.

What sense of responsibility do you carry with you?

Towards myself, an absolute one. If I do not work, I feel guilty. The audience is fundamental, because without it I would not be able to do what I do. I see myself as radically honest, for better or worse, with everyone. Within that honesty, I feel a responsibility to involve others and to teach them the difference between one second and one and a half seconds. Anyone who enters the darkroom can feel that difference, perceive it, and then reflect on it. That is why passing on this knowledge is important, even in contexts where you might not necessarily expect it. I have been blessed with a passion for photography. If I do not use it in the right way, including on a social level, then I am failing in that responsibility. I feel it deeply, and I want to carry it forward more and more. On a personal level, it is immense, and at times destructive.

Do you feel there is still something missing?

Everything. The next project is missing, and the thousand after that. I still need to understand so much more about the work I have already made. I am nostalgic for the future. Photography somehow allows you to make it permanent. I know that one day I will create something that speaks to me about the past, and that moment still lies ahead. Yet I am already nostalgic for it. I already know it will hurt. It is a form of chronic depression, but in my case it is a positive one, because it drives me to search for something that might become universal. Photography is psychology. Art is psychology. Analogue photography is art therapy taken light years further. When you take a photograph, you feel the pressure between your eye and the camera, the vibration, the breath. It is a relationship between you and the subject, even when that subject is distant. Your breathing changes. The metronome adjusts itself to the millisecond. It is necessity.