The Long Road of Sand by Romain Laurendeau

In the summer of 1959, Pier Paolo Pasolini got behind the wheel of his Fiat 500 to undertake a complete tour of Italy’s beaches. The series of magazine articles that he wrote about his journey was published as a book in the 1990s, and after reading it I decided to set off for a summer-long assault on the French coastline. My journey began on the island where I spent much of my childhood in the family vacation home, but sun-filled memories soon faded before the disenchantment of a scorching summer marked by major economic, health and climatic upheavals. Lightness gave way to the heaviness of what seems to be a profound paradigm shift, and my ‘long sandy road’ became the crossroads of worlds. In a game of counter-types my photographs experiment with the random, organic alteration of digital images printed on long-out-of-date photographic paper from the 1970s, combined with lith developer.