Passagers, Jean Pierre Favreau’s first monograph, gathers a body of work begun in the early 1980s and shaped by encounters that last no longer than a moment. Published by 5 Continents Editions in 2013, the book follows people moving through streets and public spaces, caught between attention and withdrawal, presence and disappearance. Its subjects are not treated as social types or documentary evidence; they appear as transient figures, absorbed in private thought while architecture and urban movement press around them.

Favreau works across New York, the Cape Verdes, Havana, Tokyo, and other locations, yet the book resists turning place into spectacle. Geography becomes a secondary register to a recurring human condition: the passerby briefly unmoored, crossing an environment that seems both familiar and estranging. Black-and-white photographs predominate, joined by colour images whose occasional presence unsettles rather than decorates the sequence. Together, the pictures hold on to dreamy pauses, uneasy walks, and the quiet interval in which a face or gesture seems to turn inward.

The volume is also a meeting between photography and literature. Laurent Mauvignier’s commentary accompanies Favreau’s images, giving the project a second cadence without reducing the photographs to illustration. Their collaboration attends to silence within urban noise and to the unstable boundary between seeing another person and imagining an interior life. That tension—between the observable street and the private monologue—gives Passagers its distinctive seriousness.

For collectors, the book merits attention as a sustained photographic monograph rather than a catalogue of destinations. Its 240 pages contain 143 duotone and 22 colour illustrations, presented in a 22 × 25 cm hardcover with jacket. More importantly, the sequence preserves the openness of Favreau’s encounters: the images ask to be read slowly, across cities and between moments, as a study of how people occupy—and momentarily evade—the world around them.