IT STARTED AS LIGHT…ENDED IN SHIVERS…
Between intimacy and estrangement, Anton Bou’s photographs wander — restless fragments of light and shadow, mapping the fragile terrain where self unravels into sensation.
October 12, 2025
INTERVIEW
PHOTOGRAPHY Anton Bou
INTERVIEW Melanie Meggs
In the work of Anton Bou, photography unfolds as both a method of inquiry and an act of exposure. A self-taught photographer who also carries the long practice of psychoanalysis, Anton situates his images in the fragile space where identity is less a fixed truth than a shifting encounter. His series It Started as Light…Ended in Shivers… reflects this search: photographs that oscillate between the intimate and the uncanny, between the momentary shimmer of sensation and the residue of fracture.
Anton’s photographs resist conventional anchoring. They operate nomadically, migrating between personal memory, collective atmosphere, and visual estrangement. This restlessness mirrors his own life divided between Montreal, Mexico, and “other elsewheres,” where the camera becomes what he calls “a mouth that devours everything.” It is through this appetite for sensation that his practice navigates collapse and renewal, gathering fragments of self that remain in constant motion.
What emerges is not a documentation of identity but a staging of its disintegration — a sustained inquiry into how we live through rupture, how we carry wounds, and how photography might bear witness to metamorphosis without resolution. In conversation, Anton Bou invites us to consider the photograph not as a mirror of self but as a trembling threshold, where presence dissolves into light and returns as shiver.
“I feel a growing hunger to turn more intentionally toward human subjects — to give more room to slowness, to duration, and to the subtle shifts that occur when an obsession is allowed to unfold over time. Visually, I’m also curious to explore working more without flash — letting natural light and the shadows it carves guide my eyes differently.
Concretely, I’m drawn to develop a practice that sits at the intersection of observation and encounter. I’d love to be invited into the homes of strangers, to return, to take my time. And through the mouth of my camera, to feast on whatever captures my attention — whether it belongs to the space itself or to the person who inhabits it.”
IN CONVERSATION WITH
ANTON BOU
TPL: You describe yourself as “self-taught”, yet you also carry the discipline of psychoanalysis. How do these two worlds — photography and psychology — intersect in the way you approach your work? Do you find your photographs reveal things that theory cannot?
ANTON: Your question makes me think that the term “self-taught” is quite reductive. It doesn’t account for the cultural influences that, in my case, have prepared me for photography. What it mostly means is that I didn’t go to art school and have no technical training in the field.
However, I do have an academic background in clinical psychology with a psychoanalytic approach. My photographic method is actually inspired by the investigative method used in analytic clinical practice: “Say whatever comes to mind, just as it comes, without censoring yourself,” says the psychoanalyst to the patient. This method, known as “free association,” encourages a more dreamlike, intuitive, sometimes fragmented form of speech — and in fortunate moments, a speech that escapes familiar thoughts, those locked in celebreality or caught in consensus.
I bring this openness to the instinctual and the unexpected into the early stages of my work. In a way, I tell myself: “Move toward whatever draws your attention and photograph it” — without any predetermined goal or project. Opening one’s attention to the unexpected, to what insists in spite of oneself: this is a psychoanalytic invitation that deeply inspires me.
As for comparing my photographs to theoretical texts, I’d say my images are closer to the emotional speech of a patient (who expresses, who trembles, who is moved, without necessarily understanding) than to the theorizing discourse of a psychoanalyst. My photographs attempt to “capture” what has moved me; they present experiences of being seized and try to share them so that others may explore their own sensitivity —whereas theory often seeks to reveal through the thickness of understanding.
As I’ve written elsewhere: I photograph, and I do not understand. So yes, I believe my photographs often reveal what theory alone cannot: a trembling moment that is felt, not explained.
TPL: You’ve said your camera is “a mouth that devours everything.” Can you take us back to the first time you felt this appetite awaken? Has that appetite changed over time — does it hunger for different things now?
ANTON: I imagine a long time — maybe a lifetime? — passed between the first emergence of hunger and the moment I was able to name it in a phrase. That early hunger, I imagine, is the one I carried as an infant — a baby who, at three months old, still longed to nurse even though the breast was no longer available.
Revived through photography — or even thought through it — this idea of the camera as a mouth that devours everything came to me while I was obsessively photographing a Mexican village called San Sebastián Xolalpa. There, every morning, hot-air balloons would rise and fall. Goats grazed in open fields, magnificent clouds drifted overhead, vast hedges of cactus lined the roads. Unfinished buildings, concrete walls, fences, shadows, splashes of color...it was all there. And adding to this familiar estrangement, the Airbnb I had rented was a room inside a primary school — a school I was allowed to wander through alone on weekends.
During my umpteenth visit, one evening at dusk, I found myself running across the fields to catch a shadow before it disappeared — a shadow I had first noticed on a previous stay and had been haunted by ever since. That was the moment I not only felt the hunger again but finally named it — almost like a mantra.
Textures, displaced structures, wide-open spaces, animals, and saturated colors remain within the reach of this hunger. But lately, it has started to shift — toward human subjects. Toward the human being, who may very well resemble the original object of my hunger.
And yet, I feel I still need many detours before I can fully direct this hunger toward another person — to address it to them. Who would be willing to let me circle around them for hours, again and again, to observe them from different angles, at varying distances, under shifting light?
Or perhaps more to the point: am I ready to show myself as vulnerable — as hungry — in front of someone? These are my anxieties speaking now.
TPL: Splitting your life between Montreal, Mexico, and “other elsewheres,” what role does movement and dislocation play in shaping your photographic sensibility? Do you feel more like an insider or an outsider when you’re photographing in each place?
I think travel — especially travel defined by repeated returns to the same places — has become part of my creative method. It sustains a kind of destabilization I find necessary.
For me, the challenge lies in finding the right tension between estrangement and familiarity. I am both an insider and an outsider. One of my nicknames, in fact, was once el local perdido — the disoriented local, or perhaps: the displaced insider, slightly off balance.
For such a gaze to emerge, I need to become familiar with the places I photograph — no matter how far they are from the world I come from. I need to inhabit them as if they were ordinary, everyday spaces. Otherwise, I get caught in a tourist’s gaze — exoticized, disconnected, too stable in my status as a stranger.
A German word comes to mind: der Nebenmensch — literally, “the human beside.” I love how this word holds both proximity and alterity, while also preserving a certain openness: “beside” is not a fixed point. And what if that’s the place I try to photograph from? I love when a series weaves together images from a Québécois island, the Sinai desert, and a Mexican city — and you can’t tell where each one was taken.
“Beside” is a position that belongs everywhere. In my perspective, I must work both to come closer and to step away — to seek the foreign and to create the familiar. To stand just beside.
TPL: Your project It Started as Light… Ended in Shivers… traces the collapse of self. What led you to work with this fragile territory?
ANTON: I’ll begin with an image: a house standing on stilts. One day, the fragility of one stilt becomes apparent, and the house collapses. Not entirely perhaps — but a part of it buckles, warps, falls apart.
In real life, that fragile stilt took the face of my Ph.D. advisor — and with him, the possibility of completing the thesis I had been working on for many years. That stilt also took the shape of academic success — the structure I had long entrusted with a part of my self-worth.
In my first artist bio, I had written — a bit dramatically, in a Sophie Calle kind of way: “Out of the blue, at the moment to submit my thesis, my Ph.D. advisor let me down. What could I do but buy myself a camera, throw myself into the world, and hope for healing through the creation of images?”
Pain, exquisitely rendered.
TPL: Do you view the project as an ongoing process of transformation, or as a body of work with a distinct beginning and end?
ANTON: So far, I see photography as an ongoing process of transformation — a movement driven by different forces and recurring sensations.
As for the series titled It Started as Light..., I consider it complete. It has reached its own internal coherence — in rhythm, in color, in theme. It has found its edges, its saturation point.
That said, the source it draws from has not dried up. It continues to manifest in different forms, feeding other currents.
I think of photographs as complex systems. I see them as zones of confluence — where multiple energetic streams or invisible flows meet and become visible.
So, I wouldn’t be surprised to see one or more images from that series reappear in another one — reorganized around different existential concerns, different sensuous forms.
TPL: Do you see the photograph as a site of healing, or is it closer to an open wound?
ANTON: I see photography — from the moment of capture to the moment of sharing — as a potential site of healing. At least, that’s how I’ve practiced it so far, to a large extent.
In my experience, photography allows for the emergence of connections and resonances on many levels: between the mind and the sensing body, between the self and the world, between the invisible and the visible, between images and sensations, between images and other images, between sensations and other sensations... Not to mention the work of language that also gets activated in the process — through captions, statements, or other forms of articulation.
That said, I don’t think healing necessarily means closure. Photography sustains a kind of disturbance — raw sensations, lingering traces of the wound — but all of this is held within a structure that also gives pleasure.
Let me put it this way: a photograph is a wound edged with imaginary borders — so it can become something else. Why not?
I photograph, and I do not understand.
TPL: Your images feel nomadic, able to belong to a constellation or stand alone. How do you know when a photograph wants to be solitary, and when it longs for relation?
ANTON: I think they all long for relation — but sometimes it takes time to find the right counterpart(s).
To me, that’s what nomadism is about: not a refusal of belonging, but a sustained openness to possible resonance. Solitude, in that sense, is not antithetical to connection. It’s simply part of the journey.
Series form gradually. Well, at least, that’s how It Started as Light... came together. Or perhaps it’s better to say: to the solitude of images, something gets added — a moment of resonance, suddenly heard.
It’s hard to put into words, but suddenly there’s a sense of conviction: “this fits,” “this belongs together.” That’s when something starts to coalesce — not through logic, but through a felt sense of belonging.
TPL: Do you work intuitively in the moment, or do you find yourself consciously constructing images to test certain ideas?
ANTON: I usually work intuitively, in the moment — drawn by a feeling of attraction toward a scene or a detail. Something calls me, and I seize the opportunity. Later, if the situation allows, I may spend more time constructing the composition or even introducing more intentional staging — either right then, or by returning to the same place and continuing to study it.
For example, the opening image of It Started as Light... — the torn gate facing the sea — was taken instinctively, during my very first encounter with that fence at sunset. Still, I returned to that location several times, photographing it from different angles, using natural light and flash. Yet that very first image remains my favorite.
By contrast, the photograph of the man lying on the ground resulted from a more elaborate staging process. In that same space, on the carpet, I had previously done a shoot with another model — and afterward, that session sparked ideas for scenes I hadn’t yet realized. I decided to try them with a second model: my father. Initially, I envisioned him nude, but sensing his hesitation, I shifted toward a different kind of styling — an office-worker outfit, more aligned with my dad’s comfort zone. That photo session was, quite literally, the Christmas gift I had asked for that year.
TPL: Do you see your work as autobiographical, or do you imagine it as a stage where anyone’s sense of self might enter and fracture?
ANTON: Not autobiographical, no. If anything, the word autographical would better describe my approach.
I borrow it from the psychoanalyst Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, who used it to describe a kind of writing that, through the act of writing itself, gives rise to a ‘’self’’ - not by recounting a life, but by forming a subjectivity in the act.
In other words, my aim is not to tell the story of my life through photography. I don’t use these images to narrate the loss of my thesis advisor, nor do I use them to objectively document the geographical journeys during which they were taken. And I don’t believe that, to connect with my work, viewers need to have lost a thesis advisor themselves or even know the physical location where a given photograph was made.
If I have a goal — beyond the immediate pleasure of making images — it is to feel myself into being by visually writing something. To write it from an inner vibration, reawakened through an encounter with a fragment of the world, be it living or inanimate.
I hope that this attempt at being might leave enough of a gap for others to feel something too — something that concerns them.
TPL: How important is ambiguity in your practice? Do you resist clarity, or is clarity simply not the point?
ANTON: I don’t know if I resist clarity.
To put it somewhat allegorically, I’d say I mostly fear North Korea — or rather, what North Korea shares with certain aspects of our own Western ways, as societies and as individuals, perhaps less destructively but still disturbingly. The totalitarian tendency. The freezing of ideas. The way things settle into immovable certainty, never to be questioned again.
I fear the death that becomes embedded within life. Maybe it’s human — terribly human — to freeze what’s in motion, to seal the void that makes a subject possible. If my work sometimes carries an ambiguous effect — in the photographs, or in the texts — it might be a consequence of my leaning toward openness: openness to multiple possibilities, openness to complexity. It’s also surely a consequence of what, within me, remains untamed.
TPL: Are there artists — visual or otherwise — who have helped shape the way you think about photography? Do you see yourself in dialogue with these influences, or resisting them?
ANTON: I believe every new photograph — or any new visual or written work — that moves me somehow reshapes both the way I see and the way I understand what it means to photograph.
More specifically, I deeply admire the work of Jason Fulford. His images, at once simple and striking, often carry me into that zone of familiar strangeness I’m drawn to — where things quietly creak, where coordinates begin to slip, where the everyday feels ever so slightly askew.
My work with my mentor Colin Czerwinski has also been a major source of inspiration: he encouraged me to photograph without preconceived ideas, to trust my gaze, and to let the images themselves generate meaning — through their own force and visual resonance.
Beyond photography, several thinkers from psychoanalysis and the humanities silently accompany my process: Roland Barthes, Sigmund Freud, Jean Laplanche, Jean-François Lyotard, Michel de M’Uzan, Cynthia Fleury, Jean-Claude Rolland, Francis Ponge... Even if most of them did not write directly about photography (except Barthes), their reflections on the human psyche and its unconscious depths, on the creative act and its ties to archaic, pre-verbal vitality, resonate deeply with my practice.
And the work of Sophie Calle — both performative and intimate — remains a major source of inspiration.
TPL: When you’re not behind your camera, what are the other passions or simple enjoyments that shape your days?
ANTON: When I’m neither behind the camera nor sitting in a consulting room — as a psychologist or as a patient — there’s a good chance you’ll find me in an indoor cycling class, putting into action what my Instagram handle suggests: spinning to sublime.
I also write a lot — fragments, reflections, and sometimes dreams. Writing helps me metabolize the world differently, with words rather than light.
Otherwise, I find a lot of comfort and joy in simple evenings with a friend — cooking, laughing, talking. Just being present in those shared moments.
Anton Bou’s photographs linger in the in-between, where self dissolves into sensation and images become thresholds rather than mirrors. They remind us that to see is also to be unsettled — to step beside certainty and into the trembling space of becoming. His photography moves beyond documentation, becoming a vessel for feeling. To experience the full breadth of Anton Bou’s vision is to enter this shifting terrain for yourself. See more of their work through the links below.
