Odissea is a photography book that explores childhood and the imagination through seven years of photographic work.
When we are children, we are eager to grow up. We see the adult world as an end goal, a way to gain autonomy, to no longer follow the dictates of adults and to decide for ourselves. Dressing up as an astronaut to go to the pediatrician, catching fish bigger than ourselves, believing that anything is possible... The best, as well as the worst, unfortunately. In a tumultuous epic, we raise the sails to cross this ocean of life, with adulthood in sight, the age of all promises, where nothing is forbidden, where dreams come true, and where the moon is a perfectly conceivable destination. Yet, this odyssey full of adventures will be the end of our dreams.
At the end of this long journey, on the shore of adulthood, we will want to turn back, return to childhood, and regain our carefree innocence. But our childhood memories will have faded, and the path will have disappeared. Therefore, it is necessary to document, photograph, and map this odyssey so that it is not forgotten. So that we do not forget who we were: children, hurried into becoming forgetful adults.
The Odissea project began in 2016, a few months before Sarah Bouillaud gave birth to her son. With the feeling of experiencing something both very ordinary and extraordinary, she wanted to share and pass on this adventure. “I felt that my partner, my son, and I were embarking on a journey to new lands, a one-way journey for the three of us. It seemed natural to start taking pictures.”
Odissea starts from the family microcosm, from an intimate and personal experience, and grows into a universal concept. The author recounts childhood slipping away from our memories in her own way, through a photo album of her family, moving between reality and imagination. “At the start, of course, there is a very personal and intimate desire to leave my son a record, traces of this period of which he will probably only remember a few things.”
But as she began photographing at the very start of this project, and looking back at her photos later, it became clear to her that a photograph alone was not enough. That “in reality” much more was happening, as if there were two or three parallel worlds within the same scene. There is her gaze as an observer, her projections as a mother, but above all, the child’s view of the world around him.
Through this work, she wanted to understand how her child grows, to relive with him these new worlds that gradually unfold and pass them on because, once again, we forget. Childhood is a time that evokes both joy, light, celebration — everything experienced with the wonder of first times — and also distress and darkness.
In Odissea, there is, of course, the idea of dreaming, of fantasizing about childhood, sometimes even magnifying it to remember this familiar yet distant land we left without choosing to. A poetic adventure, between joy and storm, questions and euphoria.