Creative Shortlist

In the summer of 1959, Pier Paolo Pasolini got behind the wheel of his Fiat 500 to undertake a complete tour of Italy’s beaches. The series of magazine articles that he wrote about his journey was published as a book in the 1990s, and after reading it I decided to set off for a summer-long assault on the French coastline. My journey began on the island where I spent much of my childhood in the family vacation home, but sun-filled memories soon faded before the disenchantment of a scorching summer marked by major economic, health and climatic upheavals. Lightness gave way to the heaviness of what seems to be a profound paradigm shift, and my ‘long sandy road’ became the crossroads of worlds. In a game of counter-types my photographs experiment with the random, organic alteration of digital images printed on long-out-of-date photographic paper from the 1970s, combined with lith developer.

After training in photography, Romain contracted Keratoconus, a disease that progressively deformed his corneas. During these years of illness, he explored intimacy through introspective series fed by his doubts. In 2009, a cornea transplant saved his sight. It was a new birth. Since then, he travels to document the human condition in all its social, economic and political aspects.

Very sensitive to the notions of freedom and universality, he develops an immersion approach by sharing the daily life of his subjects for months, even years. First in Senegal, but especially in Algeria, he is directly confronted with the suffering of a population subjected to issues that go far beyond them. For more than five years, he followed the youth of the working class districts of Algiers, recounting the boredom, frustration and lack of dreams of these young people who consider themselves a lost generation. A work that finally documents the deep reasons for the revolt that Algeria faced in 2019.
This work received the World Press Photo story of the year award.
He continues in the West Bank, with the first part of a project dealing with the drug problem among Israeli and Palestinian youth.
Finally, blocked by the covid crisis, he travelled for a whole summer along the French coast in order to take an intimate and sensitive look at the French and their countries in these times marked by crises and changes.
"La longue route de sable" is supported by the BNF (Bibliotheque National de France).