I  first came to know Szafran's work through Anne Garde, who in the 1980s was the appointed photographer   of the multiplied and dizzying series of the staircase at 54 rue de Seine, where the poet Fouad-El Etr, creator of the magazine La Délirante, a close friend and accomplice of Sam Szafran, published.   What delighted me  is how the pictorial space moved and attracted the ramps, the skylights, the windows and the trees opposite.  Offbeat realism, reorganized in perpetual motion, became the creation of an unknown world of incredible modernity.

When I met Sam, I understood that he was an integral part of these geometric and wandering staircase dances, that his brain, his hand, his legs, his eyes and his laughter, which I still hear today, controlled  a demanding and diabolical choreography.

 

Later, his obsession with oversized plants will be a violent song of ferocious love for nature. Szafran could be violent and ferocious, but generous, like nature!