Two Pictures a Day in Amman, last page in the daily journal from the set of "3000 Nights"

Tonight, it’s over… Tonight, it is time to draw up a preliminary account of the numbers :
- Samuel and I posted 128 stills…
- 78 of them can be considered portraits…
- 7 of them are photograms…
- I cheated 14 times by regrouping a number of photos on a single image and, the more time went by, the more I cheated…
- I also admit that more than once, I paid more attention to writing the legend than to obtaining a beautiful image…

Every director of photography and every member of a film crew knows that our profession requires us to maintain a certain amount of confidentiality. Therefore, our readers may easily imagine that it was sometimes impossible for Samuel and I to tell certain stories that only belong to the men and women who directly experienced them…

I very much enjoyed creating this daily photo journal, and sometimes I thought of my parents who don’t always know exactly what their son’s profession consists of… I imagined that my daughter might be able to better understand what often keeps me separated from her… I remembered that the caretaker of my building always thinks I’m on holiday when she sees me heading off to foreign countries for months at a time… I thought of my friends who have become used to not hearing from me regularly when I am caught up in a film And also thinking especially of those who are completely unaware of the schedule of an “intermittent du spectacle” at this time where their status is being debated in France.

Since this was a photographic journal, I would like to conclude these words with two images taken neither by Samuel nor by me : two images that one might think are fictional, but are truly extracted from “real life”…

The first image, because it is the first photo that I saw of Maisa (our lead actress) before meeting her… and because I know that today she is back in her country, far from the cameras, once again on the barricades…

The second image, because I want to believe in a different future in the Middle East before I take off for Paris, whose airports, I have always believed, are my capital city’s most beautiful monuments…

P.S. : Thank you to all those who collected – on the shores of the AFC – our bottles thrown out into big swells, little waves, or into a dead sea…

• Have a look on the latest images by Gilles Porte and Samuel Lahu, followed by links to the various weeks of their shooting in Jordan.