Dreams Happen After Dark

As a child, I fell asleep inventing worlds. On a train, in a waiting room, during long evenings of boredom, my mind drifted toward lives that did not exist. I never really stopped.

There is a kind of frustration in me, tied to how intense a life could be — the feeling of often living at the edge of something. Traveling alone, walking at night through a city whose language I don't speak, is the surest way I have found to come closer to it.

Out there, I am no longer quite the filmmaker living his everyday life in France. The streets empty out, the city falls silent, and tiny things take on an immense presence: the hum of a neon light, an air conditioner, a drop of water, my own footsteps. My attention becomes intensely focused on the outside world, and yet I have never gone so far inside myself.

It is a little like a writer at a desk: the body is in the room, the mind already lives inside the book. I am in the street, searching for a way through. And sometimes, for a few seconds, I feel I am brushing against another existence, that of another self, living somewhere on the other side.

That is probably what I look for in everything I create: those gaps of intensity, almost epiphanies, where life suddenly feels larger. Each image holds one of those moments.

I am no longer sure this is simply an artistic practice. It has become a way of living, and a way of looking at the world.

Trained in film at ARFIS in Lyon, Etienne Perrone has worked as a director and cinematographer since 2000. He pursues two distinct practices that nourish each other: films made for companies and institutions, and a personal body of work.

His experience as a cinematographer shapes his approach to framing and light; his work as a director, his taste for narrative, emotion and the exploration of a world. Across his personal work in film, music and photography, this sensibility converges on a single pursuit: drawing the viewer into an experience dense enough for its atmosphere, sound and texture to become almost tangible.

His film Gloom // Bloom (2019) was selected for and won awards at several international festivals; he also composes under the name Doppelhandel. Photography, which he has practiced since 1999, now holds a central place in his personal work.

His series Dreams Happen After Dark was named a Juror's Pick at the 2025 LensCulture Street Photography Awards and published in The Guardian on that occasion. In 2026, it was named a finalist for both the LensCulture Street Photography Awards and the AOP Open Award in London.