The Douat Family
Mosselman Island · summer 2025

It was the mother who had arranged everything. To give her family a photo session, on the banks of the Vire, on Mosselman Island — that little pocket of nature a stone's throw from the centre of Saint-Lô that so many locals know without ever quite pausing there. A simple gift, and yet a difficult one to accept for those who feel ill at ease in front of a lens.

The Douat family didn't really see themselves in the idea of posing. The two teenagers even less so. I come across this kind of reluctance often — and it is often there that the finest images are born. Not in spite of the discomfort, but thanks to it. When you aren't playing a role, you are simply yourself.

A natural setting,
a summer light.

Mosselman Island offers everything I love in an outdoor setting for a family portrait session in Saint-Lô: light filtered through the trees, the Vire in the background, close-cropped grass that never distracts from the subject. No artificial staging. Just a space in which to settle, to walk, to simply exist together.

With teenagers, the best strategy is often to have none at all. No imposed poses, no command to smile. We walk, we talk, we let things unfold. The connection between members of a family is already there — my job is simply not to disturb it.

What family photographs
truly tell us.

A family portrait session is not an exercise in style. It is a freeze-frame in a chapter of life — the children at this precise age, the faces, the glances, the way you hold yourselves close to one another. Ten years from now, these photographs will hold a value that no one can anticipate today.

That is what the mother had understood in giving this session as a gift. Not necessarily her children, nor her husband — at least not straight away. But that is how it often goes. The most sceptical are sometimes the first to be surprised by what they see in the photographs.

Thank you to the Douat family for the trust they placed in me — and to her, for having had the idea of the gift.