A #NFT photography collection dedicated to #Brest, #France.

This is Brest, the city in which I have been living for almost 10 years now.

It is a city apart, located in Finistère, which means "at the end of the earth". People here often joke that after Brest, it's New York.

It is also a city that was 80% destroyed during the war, this city at the end of the world, tirelessly bombed, the last rampart before the Atlantic. There is still the Art Deco railway station, the liner, the immaculate white locomotive, the Cours Dajot and its breathtaking view of the harbour, with its plush residences and rows of plane trees; the anarchic 19th century commercial port; the rebellious spirit of Recouvrance, a fishermen's district, a Breton enclave in this predominantly French-speaking city, designed by Vauban. There is also the military castle built on the remains of a 3rd century fortress, the brightly coloured "Loucheur" houses, the Saint-Martin church... Or the rue Saint-Malo, with its sandstone cobblestones and exploding vegetation, the last vestige of the 18th century. But the heart of the city, "Brest itself", as its inhabitants call it, has been transformed. Another face, shaped from scratch by the town planner Jean-Baptiste Mathon.

Raised by ten metres in places, flattened, the checkerboard city, nicknamed Brest la Blanche, which had become grey over time, is an exercise in geometric style. Wide perspectives, reassuring for the mind, open to the Iroise Sea, are punctuated by symbolic monuments from the 1950s and 1960s: the town hall, the Saint-Louis church, made of concrete, the courthouse...

In his verses, Jacques Prévert spoke of a "happy" city. And this spirit, today, shines through. Brest is bubbling. In its plural unity, in its cuts like the Penfeld, the river that separates the two banks, in the fractures in the landscape caused by the arsenal, with its lift bridge and its cable car, this patchwork city rebuilt on its own rubble sparkles under the Finisterian sky.