Lieux saints

Toilets, loos, lavatories, bogs and johns were places of refuge when I was young. Along with the end of the garden. I thought I had secrets, thoughts and things others must not know. Else danger. Confident solitude, well-being, required a door you could lock. And still today. I became a film-maker. Toilets were made to be fi lmed. Straightforward and functional, endlessly different, the size, the angles, the sounds, everything about them begged to be caught and canned. For one of my films, I asked the Railway Board to transport the components of a genuine train lavatory into the studio. I've rarely been near a toilet, public or private, without locking myself in with my camera. In the hope that some invisible connection between spirit of place and my sense of the day will germinate. In these places of rest, as Americans call them, I often remember Pascal's insistence that "The Maker of Angels is also a Maker of Beasts", a phrase capable of infi nite interpretation, according to taste, that helps shift my camera down, up, across... My mother's death, not long past, exercises a transformation. The shots burst beyond childhood. What was before is gone- and with it, perhaps, my fondness for loos. Henceforth, they shall be nothing more than places of ease, places of return- to dust. (Pyramide Distribution)