Groix is a small island, some eight miles off the port of Lorient, a city on the southern coast of Brittany. It takes the ferry that makes several round trips a day only about three quarters of an hour to cross to or from Port Tudy, the island's main harbor. Groix is roughly five miles long, and at its widest, it measures just under two miles. It is on this tiny land of rugged beauty that I spent a week during the summer of 1976.
There were only two types of people on Groix: natives and foreigners. The latter could be tourists like myself, or people who had been living on the island for many years but had the misfortune of having been born elsewhere. There was a little convenience store in the harbor that was run by a woman everyone called La Parisienne. She had been born in Paris some sixty-odd years earlier, and she had moved to Brittany with her family as a child. When she was in her early twenties, she met a man from Groix; they married, and she moved to the island with him. Everyone on Groix knew her because she had lived there for decades, but she would never truly belong. She was tolerated, well-liked even, but she would never be a real islander. After all, she had not even been born in Brittany!
"Ah, monsieur," she told me when I had stepped off the ferry and into her tiny shop to buy a map of the island, "welcome to Groix! The men and women here are good people, but they are difficult to get to know and they don't talk much. They can be very distant. When my husband was still alive, I was always Yann's wife, never a person in my own right, and now I'm Yann's widow, or La Parisienne, never Mariese. But the island is truly beautiful. I see you have a nice camera. Are you a photographer? Will you be here long? I can give you a few pointers if you're looking for particular things to photograph. When I arrived here, the main industry was fishing, but nowadays many people have a desk job in Lorient and take the ferry every day to get to work. My Yann would never have wanted that. He was a fisherman to the core. And of course, now there is tourism, too. Where are you staying? Do you have a place to stay already? I do have a couple of rooms to let in case you're interested, but I want to be honest with you: I don't provide any food, I don't cook, though there are plenty of places where you could get a bite to eat. Especially the seafood is wonderful, but of course it would be, this being an island and all. Bonjour madame," she interrupted her flow of words to greet a customer who had just entered her shop, and I took advantage of this disruption to escape.
La Parisienne was right about one thing: the island was gorgeous, with a craggy coastline and cliffs facing the relentless Atlantic Ocean in the south, and beautiful beaches and a generally softer coastline in the north and the east. I spent all my time wandering around, taking pictures in places with names like Locmaria, Kermarec, and Pen Men. I saw few people, and those I had to ask for directions were friendly enough, usually just pointing in the direction I had to walk without saying a word. Sometimes, I preferred to spend an hour or two lying on one of the town beaches west of the harbor, reading a book, and jumping into the water every once in a while to cool off. In the dining room of the Hôtel de la Marine, I kept to myself and did not try to make conversation with the few other guests.
There was a fairly large tent in town that became the local movie theater on one or two evenings per week. A man wearing an official-looking cap sold tickets at the entrance. The same man, this time without a cap, operated the projector; as there was only one, he had to turn on the house lights to change reels approximately every twenty minutes. This meant at least four interruptions per screening, and one of these breaks was a little longer as the truly multi-faceted employee put on his cap again and wandered through the small audience selling ice cream, candy, and cigarettes. Life in Groix was definitely not at all what I was used to.
For evening entertainment, the alternative was to go to the harbor bar. I did that a couple of times, drinking beer, smoking cigarettes, and listening to young men and women sing folksy songs in a variety of languages, accompanying them-selves on a guitar. Almost all these performers had stepped off some visiting sailboat, and they usually were German, French, Dutch, or English. The music, the laughter, the smoke, the subdued light, and the occasional curse from one of the card players in the far corner of the room made for an atmosphere that I found rather appealing.
On most evenings, though, I sat by the open window in my hotel room and wrote long letters to my girlfriend who was spending the summer at her parents' house on Long Island.
On my second or third day in Groix, I went to the harbor. The tides are very pronounced in Brittany, and one could frequently see boats standing on their keels where the receding water had left the shallower parts of the port an expanse of wet mud. This is what I was photographing when I saw Loïc for the first time. The old man was looking at me from the opposite harbor wall, his hands in his pockets. Mostly, he seemed to be shaking his head at what he probably considered poor seamanship of visitors battling the treacherous currents to reach the safety of the harbor.
The following day I was back in the same location. This time, the tide was in, and I was taking pictures of the comings and goings of the many boats. It was a bit windy, but the weather was fine with only a few white clouds in the hazy sky. The sound of a muffled cough behind me made me turn around. There was Loïc with his turtleneck sweater and blue cap, looking at me quizzically.
"Hm?"
"I'm taking pictures of the boats," I answered his unspoken question.
"Yesterday as well," he commented. His voice was deep and unhurried.
"When I was here yesterday, the light was different, and the tide was out."
"Hm."
I continued to walk along the pier, and I thought I had left the old man behind when I heard him say, speaking rather softly as if to himself, "No one ever took a picture of me."
I mulled this over while I watched a sloop with a rust-colored main sail approach the harbor entrance. The statement seemed almost inconceivable to me. My mother's parents were certainly not well off; in fact, I would not hesitate to call my mother's family poor. Yet, several photographs exist of Mom as a child. There are the one or two obligatory school pictures, and of course a print of her all dressed up on the occasion of her first communion. Many pictures exist of her as a young adult, as a mother, and eventually grandmother. To have a man who appeared to be in his eighties claim that no one had ever taken a photograph of him seemed unimaginable. The rust-colored sail had just reached the position where I wanted it, so I steadied the camera, and gently released the shutter.
"Would you like me to take your picture?" I asked without turning around.
This was followed by a long silence.
"Hm," I finally heard, and taking this for an assent, I said,
"Come on, then!" and started walking towards the harbor bar.
At this hour, the place was deserted. There was a small patio with a couple of bar stools lined up by a window with a reddish frame. "Here, have a seat," I said. I replaced the wide-angle lens that was on my camera with a short telephoto lens that I took out of my camera bag.
"Hm?"
"Well, I want your head to fill the frame, and with the lens that I just took off the camera, I would have to get so close to you that your nose would look much too big. This lens allows me to photograph you from further away, and you will look better that way."
While I was talking, the old man's hand had automatically gone up to his nose, as if to make sure it was still there and the proper size. Then he gently twirled the edges of his bushy, white handlebar mustache. I sat down on another bar stool a short distance away, looked through the viewfinder, and adjusted the exposure. He looked furtively left and right, as if he were afraid someone might see him having his picture taken.
"Look right through me to a spot behind my head," I told him. There was a bit of a reflection in his glasses, so I needed them tilted slightly, but I wanted my subject to feel comfortable with the camera first, so I decided to leave that for the second shot. I adjusted the focus and released the shutter. As soon as he heard the click, he jumped up.
"Wait," I said, "I'm going to take several pictures."
"No."
"But—"
"One. I'm not a vain man."
I was beginning to think that one photograph was all there was going to be.
"You know, this is a type of film that I can't develop myself, so when I get home, I'll have it done. Then I'll have a couple of prints made, and if you give me your address, I'll send them to you so that—"
"No."
"What do you mean, no?"
"No prints."
"But why?"
"I know what I look like."
"So maybe you don't want prints, but perhaps your wife would like—"
"No!"
"Yeah, I get it, she knows what you look like, too."
"Hm."
The old man was starting to get on my nerves.
"So, if you don't want to see the picture, why did you want me to take it?"
For a long time, he said nothing. He seemed to search for words to say something that was perfectly obvious to him, yet not at all easy to express, especially not to a foreigner some sixty years his junior. Finally, he muttered, "I'm old. Not much time left. Maybe after I'm gone, other people can see what I looked like. I'll still exist a little bit."
That was probably the longest speech he had made in weeks, possibly months. We stood there and stared at each other for what seemed an eternity. His back was perfectly straight, his eyes unblinking. Finally, I spontaneously, held out my hand.
"I'm Daniel," I said. He didn't take my hand, but he nodded ever so slightly.
"Hm."
I shot several more rolls of Kodachrome on Groix, and I even went back to the harbor a few times, but I didn't see Loïc again. On the day of my departure, I packed my duffel bag and looked around the small hotel room that had been my home for a week. I settled the modest bill and walked down the couple of hundred yards to the harbor. The ferry from Lorient was just pulling in, and I watched the midsized vessel dock. Passengers were walking off, and when they had all disembarked, I was one of some twenty people who boarded.
I was standing on deck waiting for the ferry to pull out of the harbor. As was always the case, a few locals and a handful of tourists stood on the pier to watch the departure as the captain blew the ship's horn and we started to move back ever so slowly. I looked over the small crowd, and sure enough, there was Loïc with his white mustache and inevitable blue cap, his hands deep in his pockets. I waved at him with my arm stretched out wide, and I'm practically sure I saw him give one of his nearly imperceptible nods.
Who knows, maybe his name really was Loïc. It's a good Breton name and it would suit him. It's what I always called him in my mind, and it's the way I introduce him when I show his picture to people, something I've done a few times over the years. On such occasions, I even talk to him.
"You see, Loïc, you did have your picture taken after all, and you still exist a little bit," I tell him."
"Hm," I can almost hear him reply.
In June of 2020, after I had reprocessed many of the photographs I had taken on Groix in 1976 (a few of them can be seen on this page), I remembered my encounter with this infuriating, yet strangely endearing Breton man. Over the years, I had occasionally shown people an older version of the photo, and now that I had done a better job scanning and processing the original slide, it seemed it was time to write up the story behind this portrait. This page contains the original text I wrote five years ago. If Loïc was right about still existing a little bit if people could see what he looked like, this page should give his existence more of a boost than I have managed to provide in the past. To improve things further, my friend, author, and watercolor artist Joe Scalia (look him up here) painted a portrait of Loïc; a framed copy hangs in my office in Chapel Hill, hopefully helping the subject to exist even a little bit more.
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