This post originally appeared on VICE France
In 2009, I decided to start photographing nightclub facades. I first got the idea while on a trip around Burgundy, in France. Passing by a roadside disco, I stopped the car to take some pictures.
From the outside, the place looked like an old farm, on which someone had just randomly stuck a neon sign. The parking lot was covered in torn flyers and pieces of glass that came from broken bottles of vodka and whiskey. That picture immediately took me back to my teenage years – the nonsense drunken evenings with my friends in the French countryside.
I was instantly seduced and decided to work on a series about the many nightclubs of this kind in France. These clubs have fuelled many fantasies and mysteries in my teenage brain; I used to view them as true subversive places back then.
Travelling across the country in my Ford Fiesta to photograph nightclub facades made me feel like I became a kind of doorstep salesman - except that instead of selling vacuum cleaners, I was buying into an idea of adolescence I had long lost.
