PS : je t’écris de la plage des Mouettes, photo essay by Sandra Mehl
[F]ar from the crowd of summer tourists on the Mediterranean coast, the “Seagull Beach” in Sète (France) spans several hundred meters along the Etang de Thau. Here, there are no roads, no stands, no streetlights.
Just a handful of locals and regulars who have been coming here since their childhood. As a Sète native, I shot this series during the summer of 2012, 2013 and 2014.
Q&A with Sandra Mehl
Photography is…
…fixing moments and people who you want to remember of. It is a way to create personal remenbering and a collective patrimonial. In a way, It is bringing the past into the present for people not to forget it.
Who left the biggest impression on you?
I think the photographer that left me a big influence is Lee Friedlander.
Tell us a little about yourself
As a sociologist researcher, documentary photography appears as a way to mediatize contemporary issues, in another way than with words and a logic way of thinking. My main interest is about relationship between human beings and their social and natural environment. I ‘ve explorated territory as a purpose of political struggle trought a first work about in Israel/ Palestine, but also as a tool for the construction of social identities, mainly in working class worlds.
Sandra Mehl (website)
1980, I am a french independant photographer living in Montpellier, South of France.
