Meeting with Pauline Chardin - Photography and travels
Hello Pauline, can you introduce yourself and tell us about your background in a few words?
I am a freelance art director and photographer. My first specialty is fashion and clothing, but over the years my field of intervention has expanded to lifestyle, beauty and food. A few years ago I createdtheVoyageur , a travel and photography blog designed as an inspiration book.
You are a great traveler, can you explain to us the place that travel holds in your life?
I started working at a very young age, and travel immediately imposed itself as the reward and the essential counterpoint. It's a way for me to recharge, creatively and emotionally, but also to afford the best education. Traveling satisfies my very great curiosity and allows me to touch a feeling of freedom.
What was your fondest travel memory?
Japan surely. After this year of pandemic being deprived of travel, the slightest memory of there has taken on even more value. This feeling that my world has suddenly shrunk makes me quite melancholy, but I also find myself trying to remember insignificant moments of travel with great precision. The opposite of great exceptional moments in the end? And yet it is to those tiny moments that my mind returns with great pleasure, a sticky mochi on a rocking boat, the sound of a xylophone on a beach, a crab slipping away under a staircase...
Your creativity is also expressed through photography, how would you define your style and what drives you in this art?
I came to photography out of the need to document what inspired me. Like a journal, a collection. I felt it as a moment of freedom but also precious nourishment for the rest of my creative projects. In my personal work as for orders, what fascinates me is to see how the initial intuition then gives shape to a universe, tells a story that we did not suspect. I like images that stimulate the imagination.
You recently settled in the Drôme, in a superb house lost in nature which inspires us enormously at Hygée. Can you tell us about this project?
A few years ago, I began to realize that the balance between my desire for the city and my need for nature was being reversed, until I associated the countryside, and no longer Paris, with feelings of freedom, possibilities and creativity. My husband and I both grew up in the countryside, and we wanted to come back there under very different conditions from those we had known as children. We therefore imagined living in a contemporary house very close to nature, from which we could work remotely but also go to Paris easily if necessary. It took a long time to complete the project, but being able to take advantage of this haven today, especially in these troubled times, is a real privilege.
Do you have morning & evening routines to feel good in body and mind?
When I imagined my future daily life from my little Parisian living room, I saw a lot of yoga there...in practice, that's not really the case for the moment! The real revelation for me will have been the proximity of nature and the garden. The meditative effect of watching nature change, plants grow, listening to the wind in the branches, disconnects me from everything that clutters my mind. I spend a lot more time outdoors than I used to, and that seems like the solution to many ailments.
I'm not very disciplined when it comes to staying still and inactive, but a little accessory has triumphed over my hyperactivity: the cork brick. After a seated or stressful day, I lay on it, placing it first on my lower back (the top of the brick at the level of the coccyx), then on top (the bottom of the brick at the level of the bottom of the shoulder blades ). I find it relaxing and rebalancing.
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Find Pauline on her Instagram account
