Fabien Ecochard is a self-taught photographer based in Paris. His photographic work is drawn to ordinary lives, gestures, presences and situations that shape everyday life. Away from the spectacular, he pays particular attention to what Georges Perec called the “infraordinary” - what is already there, right before our eyes - and to those moments when reality suddenly takes on a deeper intensity. His images emerge from a meeting between what reality offers and what he projects onto it, somewhere between observation and imagination. This intuitive and sensitive approach shapes a photography in which people, places, composition and colour are never disconnected. Colour also plays a documentary role: it carries traces of a place, a time and the changes taking place within them. Ecochard develops long-term projects, notably in Paris and Istanbul, building open-ended bodies of work over the years, shaped as much by the transformation of places as by the persistence of everyday life. His work often implicitly explores what shapes a city and those who inhabit it: movement, belonging, representation, and the ways in which people coexist within increasingly cosmopolitan environments. His first book, Cosmopolite, focused on Paris, marks a first step in this ongoing research. Rather than being defined by the category of “street photography”, his work is rooted in an authorial approach, built around creating narratives within individual images and across sequences of images. His practice spans both digital and analogue photography, informed by the tradition of colour photography and by the legacy of the Leica M system. He has maintained a close relationship with Leica for many years, through photographic projects, workshops and ongoing exchanges around the medium.