Une Habitude Curieuse (A Curious Habit) is an ongoing photographic series made during repeated journeys to Bretagne and Normandie, French regions I have returned to over a number of years with family. Staying in the same accommodation and revisiting the same beaches, roads, corners, and coastal paths has established a familiar rhythm, where observation becomes inseparable from routine. Photography is no longer simply a means of recording these places, but an integral part of inhabiting them.
The title refers to the paradox of curiosity becoming habitual. Returning to the same locations might suggest repetition, yet each visit offers subtle shifts of light, weather, and human presence. The camera searches not for novelty, but for difference within the familiar: an empty roadside at dusk, a scooter parked, window vista’s, kayaks abandoned on a beach awaiting the tide. These are modest moments, easily overlooked, that accumulate into a portrait of place shaped as much by memory as by geography.
Informed by the cinematic sensibility of Éric Rohmer (1920–2010), whose films, in particular A Summer’s Tale (Conte d’été) (1996), find quiet drama in the banality of the coastal town of Dinard, these photographs reveal themselves gradually rather than spectacularly. Like Rohmer’s characters, the photographs linger on moments of waiting, passing and contemplation, inviting the viewer to experience the gentle quality of the ordinary and the familiar. The repeated act of looking, photographing and revisiting familiar places becomes a form of permanence in itself, where habit is not the opposite of curiosity but the condition through which curiosity is sustained. Through repetition, the landscape becomes both known and continually rediscovered.
David Bennett Photographer 