François-Marie Banier – Tranquille

This book presents François-Marie Banier’s portraits of Moroccan construction workers sleeping or at rest in their places of work. Caught in moments of dreaming and escape from their labor, Banier’s subjects blend into the soft grey atmosphere of his pictures and seem, if but for a moment, to have escaped the harsher facts of reality. These are candid and tender portraits which continue Banier’s practice of photographing strangers he meets in small and large cities. In his words: “To photograph workers asleep on the very ground of their construction site was, once again, to follow the paradoxical lines of being, a solitude embodied in movie heroes who change faces, roles, centuries and sometimes genders, in each of their naps.” It is not the dreamer’s spirit only that sleep inhabits. The body in a lying position aligns with the horizon and the dreams that travel across it. My capacity for tenderness overflows: life going to sleep flirts with abandonment, this elegance of any fighter, life being nothing but a battlefield. François-Marie Banier