The countryside around Nevers, where I was born, has always felt both familiar and elusive to me. It is part of Burgundy, though not the world-famous part of it with its renowned vineyards and plush villages. To one simply travelling through it, the scenery might just look pleasantly bucolic, with its profuse greenery, cultivated fields, densely-wooded areas and lush pastures grazed by herds of Charolais-type cows. Yet my relentless, dedicated photographing of the countryside over the last ten years was never intended to produce a pretty, sedate picture but to document the imprint of man on it. Nothing, or next to nothing, is left to chance here, nothing is fixed; the impact of human toil is everywhere apparent. Paradoxically, human interference in the countryside has played an ambivalent part, both distorting and magnifying it, thus exposing the intense vividness behind the banal and the ordinary. Powerful formal qualities emerge, uncontrolled, where man sought to shape and exploit the land. The country is interspersed with pylons, water-towers and farm buildings which give it a rhythm of its own; fences, hedges, paths and roads draw their wavy, intersecting lines across it. Beyond its geographic dimension, this series of highly subjective snatches testifies to the gradual shaping up of an internal sensory and emotional landscape. Away from the spectacular, my intention is to draw attention to the ordinarily beautiful as well as to the aesthetic potentialities underlying the silent morphing of the landscape.