“11_The little one departs, the great one arrives. Peace,” is an intimate, essential journey—a rite of passage that answers the call of our own “inner hero.”
It is an adventure toward a universal consciousness of existence, a visionary endeavor filled with hope, respect, and love for our planet, our Mother Earth: a journey in which the mind and heart are the heroes, inviting the realization of the hero within each of us.
As he walks, man, in all his humanity, bridges the gap between heaven and earth, time and space, the unique and the universal, the timeless and the infinitely vast…

All the images in this series are photographs taken during this quest, a quest that involves looking back in the footsteps of this monomyth that is my own (cf. Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces): it is a geographical and temporal adventure, but also a spiritual one: familiar landscapes, apparitions like flashes from the past, the interweaving of one time into another… All of this “creates” an allegory in the exact, Greek sense, namely “speaking in figures,” which I would transpose to “telling stories through images,” attempting to represent, through concrete, real elements, an abstract notion: peace finally found after a long journey…

This photographic project, inspired by great myths such as Ulysses and Icarus, centers on the symbolism of travel, whether real or imaginary.
Travel expresses a certain relationship to time and space. It evokes discovery, progress, and openness, and always results in a change of state: to travel is to set out to discover the world, but also to discover oneself, the two paths destined to converge...

So I set out once more in the footsteps of the past, sometimes in a broad sense and sometimes through “Proustian madeleine” details. I retraced this path that embodies my story, my journey.

Just as Homer anchored his narrative in a concrete geographical reality, the narrative of my journey is anchored around the Mediterranean, but this geography is symbolic and corresponds less to a topographical reality than to a fabulous, mythological imaginary journey.
This imagination is revealed to the eye through images—first mine, then everyone’s—powerful images of a drift, of a stormy journey, but also images that offer support, that accompany the turbulence, the trials, and the discovery.

“11_The little one departs, the great one arrives. Peace” is a journey of self-discovery into the depths of the self toward transcendence: this reflection on my existence is a true exploration, as it embodies the “Know thyself” advocated by Socrates. The journey is thus synonymous with letting go, with stripping away, but also with trial and liberation: little by little, the traveler—or rather, in this case, the female traveler—becomes aware of her true, essential nature; she becomes herself again.

It is Jung’s “rediscovering the self,” finally accepting my human condition, making peace with oneself—it is almost heroic.
And when poetry is present—the poetry of photographs, of places visited and cherished, of precious memories—it is all the easier to unearth and express. Writing one’s personal myth, telling it through photographs, allows us to infuse poetry and beauty into the tragedy we sometimes experience. It is also by depersonalizing the myth through this form of narration that others can make the story their own and identify with the heroine.

Agnes L | artist