The 258 pictures were made in Paris and in France in 2008 with a digital camera and are reproduced here in full. They were conceived with this volume in mind and are therefore not to be considered as separate entities: we are in editing, and so in a writing proper to the medium. Views of daily life, taken in private and in public space, they accumulate and compile like a disillusioned painting of the Sarkozy years.

“I wanted to make a book, that is to say a river, a city, a landscape. And when, with Dominique Gaessler, we designed the form, this white band running all along the pages appeared to me afterwards like the imprint of the sound track of a 35 mm reel, on which the silent terror of the cover image was printed. As for the title, it says exactly what the dictionary says: persistence, repetition, reinforcement, reserve.”