On the footsteps of three cults novels ("Tristessa" by Jack Kerouarc, "Under the Volcano" by Malcolm Lowry and "Voyage to the Land of the Tarahumara" by Antonin Artaud), Nicolas Comment spent two months in an artist residency in Mexico. His Mexico City Waltz series is, foremost, a photographic poem combining images in order to compose a visual equivalent of the “spontaneous prose” dear to Kerouac’s heart. Mexico City Waltz pays homage to the beauty and the sensuality of today’s Mexico.

"In 2000 I came first at Vitre. Patrick Le Bescont would publish the final book by Bernard Lamarche-Vadel, "Mise en Demeure" (with photographs by Jean-Philippe Reverdot). I was 25, I had just moved to Paris and Patrick had hired me as an assistant some time ago. The latest book by Bernard Lamarche-Vadel was thus the first book in which I participated: I had the script in hand and worked on the layout of text. I already knew the critic and soon feverishly read all his books. It was obvious to me than anything since Camera Lucida Roland Barthes had been writing about photography in France that has reached that level of tone, panache ... But I did not know that beneath the mask grating was...

“Is that the East?” is a Berlin romance, a fix film, an imaged disc. It is a musical and photographical ballad in the ex-East Berlin, haunted by the ghost of the Wall and totalitarianisms, but also by the music of David Bowie and Lou reed. Colour pictures associated to an EP concept album of six songs: Est-ce l’Est ?, Birgit, Tout autour, Baisers de Prenzlauer, Sur la Tor, and U-bahn, were produced in Berlin. For one of the first time, author photography and pop music – two “halftone art” – are put together in a coherent whole in this original and collector object. Visual and sound novel, “Is that the East? (Berliner romanze)” is as much a photography book as a rock record (produced by...

Carefully and thoroughly, Nicolas Comment began listening to the Czech capital, its streets away, its abandoned places, its quiet moments, almost deafening at dusk. The title Fading expresses a previously planned project by Roger Vailland but also highlights the mitigation of the unacceptable accumulation of sounds, images and gestures that invades the city. Once the background noise removed, the crowd departed, the horizon cleared of sensitive unnecessary images, it becomes possible to perceive the essence, the details that have escaped the frenzy ambient and we return like surrounded by melancholy. Bertrand Schmitt

The dust of time falls in the pictures, this way their content pours out in it and their substance becomes the one of a lost paradise. We think we watch a memory while we attend to the appearance of an instant, which seeks to incite in us its own following episode: the sequel of a history of which it was separated. This movement, from we feel it, disturbs our memory, and then there is it which pursues in the impression of a déjà-vu, as mislead. Is it someone, something, a country? It’s instead, and by turns, the knowledge of their fall behind the black and white thing, which softly snows. The return path stops in front of a curtain, which cut the space, and which is also in it. “Watch the...

Realised within the context of an artist residency, for the celebration of the fortieth anniversary of the death of Jean Cocteau, those pictures give off strangeness, not “worrying” but inherent to those pictures themselves. Their content remains enigmatic, keeping the viewer in a doubt state, transmitting bits of comprehension to dip back the next picture into a vagueness form, nearby the dreaming. For Nicolas Comment, it’s not a matter to show to his viewer photography in where the obvious fact would win: if some references are explicit (as the Welcome Hostel of Villefranche-sur-mer where Cocteau wrote Opium, or the presence of the horse head and the black angel of the film “Le Testament...

Someone is coming. Someone is leaving. As he doesn’t let a face, it’s the world that becomes to look like. Or, at least, a certain tendency for the world to make a sign when it goes pale tenderly. The thing is rare, of course: it appears hot on a passer-by’s heels, it lights its track with love. But, those ones who are seen on this track don’t already know who is passed by this piece of wall, who has smiled when he crossed those trees and has let float his smile, who has touched this hand or watched those ruins or desired in this room. ...

Wrecks: a blind mirror, a black handbag on a pink bedspread, a car windscreen in the twilight, a motel room, a young girl with a look brimming in a white riddle light...You just are the witness of an obscure business, in which lost knowledge loaded clouds exchange themselves. You think you travelled but you never leaved your bed. You were the toy of a distract genius that took the wrong vehicle: somebody has travelled on your place, navigated without your knowing it in the most protected roundabout of your intimacy, stool your dream, and leaved you on the other side of the sleep – among those wrecks – only evidences, now, that it had happend.