France

If you haven’t noticed, I have a French last name (and an Irish first name and a British middle name). As I understand it, some of my ancestors originally lived in France, although I also know my great-grandmother moved to the US from Sweden when she was 16 years old, and I have a grandfather who came from England to Canada as a child. I remember being told that we were Canadian French.

Anyway, my “French heritage” probably influenced me to choose French as my required foreign language in high school. After three years of intensely avoided study, however, I could not really say nor understand much at all.

When work took me to Montreux, Switzerland in 1993, I decided to make up for my lost youth and push myself to learn to speak French and to visit the country. I never really learned French, to be honest, but I did meet, travel with, and later marry a Danish woman destined to become a French language school teacher in Denmark.

None of this really has anything to do with the pictures I’ve taken in France. It’s just what came to mind.

While my then wife was studying to become a teacher, she spent three months living in France in 2001, so my first pictures come from visiting her there. Later, she and I went to Corsica on vacation in 2006. It was only my visit in 2014, to meet up with an uncle, that I was taking photography seriously.