Meeting Réhahn in March 2024 was decisive. We first met through Musset, whom I study as a university researcher. Réhahn owns a great many manuscripts by the poet. This shared passion, his as a collector and mine as a researcher, immediately created fertile ground for exchange.

I then discovered his artistic universe. Like many people, I knew a few emblematic photographs from his catalogue, but I explored his artistic journey more deeply and entered his world. All of this made me want to write a personal essay that could convey this original body of work to the public.

Réhahn’s gaze seeks to capture the ephemeral, what most often escapes us because it is fleeting or intangible. Portraits predominate in his work because Réhahn is above all a humanist who believes that the heritage of a country or region is not only embodied in stone, but literally in the people who inhabit it.

His gaze has been compared to that of an ethnologist or anthropologist, but I do not think that is entirely accurate. An artist’s gaze also tells a story about the world, his own story. Above all, I find that Réhahn has an idealistic approach to the world he observes, neither despairing nor declinist. He sees beauty even in what our Western criteria do not regard as ideals of beauty: weathered faces and deeply lined hands. Over time, he has cultivated the art of a landscape artist, expressing beauty differently through an Impressionist gaze.

This diversity can be explained by a relatively simple phenomenon: the evolution of the way an artist looks at the world. Réhahn dislikes the categories into which artists are too quickly placed. He belongs to the category of artists one might describe as mobile. After exploring ethnic groups through portraits that became iconic, he pursued other paths, notably Impressionist photography.

This bold and demanding choice also reflects an inner evolution and, perhaps, a move away from photographic realism. I find the pictorial character of some of these photographs striking. The texture, the composition, the colours, everything is painting. Without manipulation, using only heat and wind, Réhahn captures true paintings.

I wanted to undertake the experience of writing about a living body of work, rooted in our present, and to offer a few keys to understanding the creator and his work. In other words, the book also has an educational purpose, although above all I invite readers to contemplate the images and make them their own.

My idea was to establish certain connections between Réhahn’s photography, the history of the arts and literature. I therefore chose literary epigraphs that seem to me to resonate with the works or with certain aspects of Réhahn’s journey.

I would like readers to feel that beauty still triumphs, despite a chaotic and violent world. What is striking about Réhahn’s photography is that it most often expresses a profound sense of peace and a joy in being in the world. It celebrates life at every age.

I would like readers to feel a sense of hope after closing the book. More prosaically, perhaps, I would like them to want to see Réhahn’s photographs, either in his museum in Vietnam or in the various exhibitions devoted to his work in France and Europe.