Some photographers shoot the world as it is. Olivier Valsecchi shoots the moment a person turns to ash and begins again.
We first wrote about the French photographer for his extraordinary Dust project — figures covered in ash and powder, bodies caught between disappearance and rebirth — and later had the chance to ask him a few short questions. What came back was as candid as the work.
The loner who never quite left
“I had a lot of dreams and nightmares at night,” he told us of his childhood, “and I was very energetic and creative by day, always jumping around or writing songs and performing them alone in my room. I was definitively a loner, building a life aside. My friends used to call me to go cycling or play games and I always used lame excuses not to go.” Then, with a shrug you can almost hear: “But I am still a child and most of these things are still true.”
Asked what he cannot work without, he listed: moments of solitude, absurdity, someone to talk to, a notebook to sketch ideas. Asked about Dust, he framed it as escape and renewal at once: “It all started with this feeling that I had slept in the cocoon for too long and needed to get out of it. It was all about reinventing yourself, exploding to go further and experience new pathways. Tabula rasa.” His touchstone, unsurprisingly, is David Lynch’s Inland Empire: “You don’t need to understand the movie, only to feel it.”
Why it still resonates
Valsecchi’s ash bodies have only grown more legible with time. Tabula rasa — the wish to burn the old self down and walk out of the cocoon — is the defining fantasy of a culture forever promising reinvention. What his photographs insist on, and the slogans don’t, is that rebirth is messy: you come out covered in the dust of what you were. That honesty is what makes the images beautiful rather than merely clean.