Michel GOETZ

Michel Goetz is no longer here, he is everywhere...
He was undoubtedly my closest and most "distant" friend since he had left to join his wife Lorraine in Montreal! 6000 km of distance and bi-annual return trips in November and April (as a parenthesis between the winter of Quebec) during which we got to know each other better.
We met in another life while I was Project Manager in the "City Policy" and he worked with me as a consultant or "outside look", a mission he found again when I was interested in photography...
We worked together for more than 10 years and after his departure in Canada, during his visits to the metropolis, we recognized ourselves as Friends.
Because it was me, because it was him,"wrote Montaigne, whose essays he regularly reread as he was passionate about the theories that explained how the brain worked: I was always convinced that if he was passionate about this subject, it was because he was looking for" mechanical "explanations, objective and devoid of the behaviours of his contemporaries and certainly of his own.
What can we say about this "magic of suspended time" which allowed us to resume our exchanges with each of our reunions as if they had not been interrupted by the distance first of all and then by this disease which he evoked so clinically that it became both inevitable and external to our friendly relationship. It probably did not allow me to admit the imminence of his "departure" and I will have to accept that our dialogue was interrupted...
He was undoubtedly the closest human being to what could be described as an "honest man" curious of others and forbidden to make judgements a priori about them, but he was also capable of uncontrollable "Homeric" anger against what he considered to be idiotic manifestations of authority...
At each of his passages in France, he rediscovered Paris but without any past nostalgia: he was passionate about each of the changes announced and took pleasure in seeing their progress... With humour, he told me "that he was coming to control the building sites" and I tried to keep him informed of the progress I could see, while minimizing some of my criticisms....
He was for a long time the first visitor of this site and I still "owe" him a series of photos downstream of the Seine that we had been spotted together...
Before he died, he wished that all those who had "a little piece of his knowledge" could meet and exchange it. I found some of the photos I took of him during our walks and, as his son wrote to me, they reflect our complicity and some of his different facets and moods. You may not have had the chance to meet Michel GOETZ, but let me introduce you to a little bit of what I think I know about him…