In Zone de repli, Cédric Delsaux returns to the Pays de Gex, near Geneva, under the shadow of the Jean-Claude Romand case. For years Romand sustained the fiction that he was an internationally employed medical researcher; instead of going to work, he drove through the surrounding region and waited out his days alone. His deception ended in the murder of his family. Delsaux approaches this territory not as a crime reporter reconstructing evidence, but as a photographer considering how a lie can alter the experience of an ordinary landscape.
Over three years, Delsaux followed Romand’s routes, often remaining alone in his car for hours and avoiding contact with local residents. This self-imposed method gives the project its particular tension. The region is neither presented as a neutral topography nor made to illustrate a biography directly. It becomes a psychological space: familiar roads and peripheral places are viewed through the knowledge of concealment, waiting and imminent collapse.
The work continues Delsaux’s exploration of reality as something already shaped by fiction. Here, however, that concern is handled on an intimate scale. The photographs do not claim access to Romand’s mind; they test the instability of perception itself, asking how a known history changes what a viewer believes a place contains. The title’s “zone of retreat” therefore names both a physical circuit and an interior condition—an area in which outward routine and private unreality coexist.
Published in French by Éditions Xavier Barral in 2014, the book presents the series as a sustained sequence of images, intended to be entered like a novella rather than read as a documentary dossier. For collectors concerned with the relationship between landscape, narrative and psychological projection, Zone de repli merits close attention for the restraint of its method. Its significance lies less in depicting a notorious case than in making the photobook itself a space of uncertainty, where factual history remains present but never resolves the images.
