Une Habitude Curieuse (A Curious Habit) is an ongoing photographic series made during repeated journeys to Bretagne and Normandie, regions I have returned to over a number of years. Staying in the same holiday home 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, season and human presence. The camera searches not for novelty, but for difference within the familiar: an empty roadside at dusk, a scooter paused in quiet concentration, 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.
The work is informed by the cinema of Éric Rohmer, whose films find quiet drama in everyday encounters and landscapes that reveal themselves gradually rather than spectacularly. Like Rohmer’s characters, these photographs linger in moments of waiting, passing and contemplation, allowing ordinary spaces to carry emotional weight. The images resist narrative resolution, instead inviting the viewer to experience the gentle cadence of return.
Rather than documenting travel, Une Habitude Curieuse reflects on the rituals that define it. The repeated act of looking, photographing and revisiting familiar places becomes its own form of permanence, where habit is not the opposite of curiosity but the condition that allows it to deepen. Through repetition, the landscape becomes both known and continually rediscovered.
David Bennett Photographer 