Piémanson beach, in the heart of the Camargue Regional Nature Reserve, welcomes thousands of summer visitors every year from all over France and Europe. These ephemeral visitors, who are far more than mere campers, set themselves up on the sand for several months, then move on at the end of the summer, leaving no trace.
This tradition, perpetuated for more than 30 years, has contributed to creating a mythical place, part of everyone’s memory who has been here and the imagination of everyone who has heard tales of it.
The Camarague is a place of evolving geography : a passage between land and sea, where the mistral wind and sea flooding wipes out borders. At Piémanson, man listens to nature and has learnt to to cope alone again, to live with little.
If the joy of returning remains intact, it is because Piémanson is the last wild beach in France, an island in the midst of a Mediterranean coastline that has been devoured by tourism. This “little beach of diehards”, which lives for four months with none of the basic commodities, has reinvented a certain form of living together.
Piémanson is elusive for the photographer too. I consciously moved away from documentary photographer and have tried, through small tableaux, evocative of a staged form of photography not actually used, to breathe a poetic feel into the documentary subject matter.
All images © Vasantha Yogananthan
