For as long as I can remember, I dreamed of capturing the beauty of rural southern France — the same beauty that once inspired Toulouse-Lautrec and Van Gogh.
Their brushstrokes carried not only color but also longing, a search for the timeless beauty hidden in ordinary landscapes.
My own wanderings in southern France often ended in Arles during Les Rencontres d’Arles, and my countryside wanderings carried me no farther than Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, where I always found myself stopped by the soft pink of flamingos drifting across the marshes. Yet it was only last autumn, almost by chance, that I discovered Douelle — a small village in the Lot Valley, near Cahors.
At first sight, Douelle appeared almost too modest to inspire a photographic project. Two streets, a bakery, a grocery, a bridge tying its halves together. I arrived during harvest, when the vineyards obeyed the steady rhythm of harvesting under an ever-changing sky. It seemed too narrow, too quiet, as though nothing here could grow into a story. Yet by lingering, I realized that stillness itself was the story. What looked like limitation revealed itself as a gift.
Douelle resonated with me because it carried me back into my childhood in South Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union — a place of endless fields and the river that shaped my earliest memories. Even the bridge then was metal, much like the one in Douelle, casting the same dark shadow over the slow-moving waters of the Yuzhny Bug — a shadow that drew me gently into the depths of memory. Being in Douelle felt like standing between two times, the present and a past I thought I had left behind.
Autumn, with its rains and fogs, transformed the village into a shifting stage of my memories and imagination. Mornings dissolved into haze, blurred as if painted by memory. Then suddenly the sun would break through, turning muted greys into radiant gold before fading once again. Douelle was never the same twice, always shifting beneath autumn’s charm.
At night, another transformation unfolded. Darkness consumed the streets, leaving only fragments of life visible: the glow of headlights from passing cars, the solitary lamp on the bridge. Many of my frames contain only one light, placed deliberately. That light became symbolic, carrying memory and dream.
To hold these fleeting atmospheres, I relied on two very different tools. Most of the series was created with a Leica M11, capable of preserving subtle gradations of fog, rain, and sunlight. But when night arrived, I turned to the iPhone. Its limitations gave the images a rougher, grainier texture. Together, these devices spoke in two voices: the delicacy of Leica color and the harshness of the iPhone’s overexposed night lights.
This work is not only about Douelle, but about how a place awakens memory. The fog of a French village opened echoes of my childhood, where life was tied to the land, the fields, and the river. These images are thresholds between past and present — between what is remembered and what is felt anew.
I invite the viewer not simply to look, but to enter: to feel the hush of morning fog, the softened echo of footsteps on wet pavement, the weight of memory contained in a single light. My hope is that these photographs do not describe, but evoke — opening a space where each person might encounter their own bridges to the past.
In the end, Douelle gave me what I had long searched for: not postcard-perfect views, but a place where obscurity itself became beauty, where silence spoke, and where the smallest details carried meaning. Out of that recognition, this series was born — Douelle: Light in the Fog — a meditation and a memory, where fog, light, and stillness turn the ordinary into the extraordinary. [Official Website]
