I wanted to do a work in which portraits and landscapes were fused. I spent six weeks in a town on the Atlantic coast, Royan, where, every week, I met with pupils from a local college. My purpose was to show a different view on teenagers and on the world they are living in. For weeks I taught them the history of photography with past and contemporary artists. Gradually, we got to know each other by talking freely about creation, history, the news, music…I did not want to ask them questions, I wanted to listen to them. Often an adult’s vision of teenagers is based on clichés about being frivolous, sexuality, consumerism, carelessness… Some of them told me about their lives, their point of view on the world the adults built and how it can be hard to make their mark in it. When I wasn’t with them I was making images of the town; you may not know but Royan was entirely destroyed at the end of the second world war; it’s a city rebuilt with modern architecture everywhere. It’s a small town on which there has already been a dozen photography books published! Not so simple when you have only six weeks to make a new work and so I let my path run outside the town centre; the landscapes I made are introspective, they are self-portraits in a way. At the opening, the local citizens were disappointed seeing their town portrayed in this way – on the other hand, the teenagers understood perfectly the images.