CARNET DE VOL

Pragmatic, Christian Sanna began by immersing himself for long hours in the municipal archives of Toulouse: photographs from the Latécoère collection, letters, maps, registers, flight logs, testimonies of Aéropostale enthusiasts... A whole body of material which he soaked up, which he let work in him and reproduced in fragments. Then he went to hang around the Montaudran aerodrome, imagining the departures of these small planes, the Breguets, the Salmsons, the Latés, the Potezes... whose lightness, cramped conditions and lack of a cabin obliged the pilots, with their precious mailbags wedged between their legs, to face the harsh climatic and meteorological conditions day and night. And of course the famous Hôtel du Grand Balcon, near the Place du Capitole, some of whose rooms have been preserved in their original state and of which he photographed the famous number 32, that of Saint-Exupéry. But Christian Sanna did not want to limit himself to the Toulouse traces of this epic, because he is above all a travelling photographer who cannot conceive of the photographic act outside of a personal form of confrontation between reality and his imagination. Like Mercury, the god of travel "with winged sandals", he followed the route taken by the pilots of Aéropostale between Toulouse and the Perthus border, in search of the lighthouses which, in the absence of sophisticated navigation instruments, guided their flights. A real road movie doubled as a treasure hunt to find these beacons and transformers, from village to village, and to photograph the remains and imprints left in the landscape.

Dominique Roux