Marcel Mochet
Journey to the End of the Seas

  • France
  • fr
  • en
  • 51'
Marcel Mochet | Journey to the End of the Seas
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Synopsis

Journey to the End of the Seas traces the career of Marcel Mochet, a photojournalist who devoted a major part of his work to the maritime world. During his thirty years at Agence France-Presse, he documented deep-sea fishing, the merchant navy, the French Navy, offshore activities, and ocean racing, regularly boarding vessels around the world. The documentary looks back on a photographic practice rooted in immersion and close contact with those who work at sea. From the cold waters of the Far North to the Southern Ocean, Marcel Mochet captures the identities and living conditions of these crews. Through his photographs and testimony, Journey to the End of the Seas highlights a body of work attentive to the human, social, and physical realities of life at sea. It also extends the work brought together in Les Pêcheurs des extrêmes, Mochet’s book devoted to deep-sea fishing crews, which received the Prix du livre maritime in 2013.

What you will find in this film

Thirty years of maritime photography alongside crews at sea • A practice shaped by immersion, endurance, and proximity • The daily lives of seafarers, between labor, isolation, and solidarity • From northern waters to southern seas, a human world marked by hardship • A photographer’s eye attentive to gestures, faces, and life on board

Keywords

Reportage & Society The Artist at Work Photography Careers Photographic Film Nature & Landscape
A darkroom is something totally magical.
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You don't need to travel to the ends of the earth or cover extraordinary events to make photographs that will become part of history.

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What you’ll find

Portraits of photographers, names everyone knows and others you’ll discover here. Films about street photography, war, fashion or portraiture, about printing and historical processes. About the trades of photography too. And then suggestions for going further, with Focuses, articles, interviews, bibliographies.

A small independent team

Documentaries about photography were rarely shown on television, and hardly at all on streaming platforms. We created The Darkroom Rumour to give them a place of their own. We are a small team, and we choose every film ourselves, with no school to defend.

Inspire your photography

In these films, you see photographers at work, in the field as well as in the darkroom. If you take pictures, you’ll often come away with an idea to try. If you simply like looking at images, you may start to see them differently.

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The authors/artists

Nicolas Raynaud
Nicolas Raynaud
Film director
Marcel Mochet
Marcel Mochet
Photographer

Further exploration

Selected bibliography

• Allan Sekula, Fish Story, Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, 1995. Libraries

• Marcel Mochet, Les pêcheurs des extrêmes, Éditions du Rocher, 2012 (in French). Libraries

• Marcel Mochet, Ouvriers de l'océan, Palantines, 2013 (in French). Libraries

• Susan Meiselas, Mediations, Damiani, 2018. Publisher · Libraries

Online

• Production in View: Allan Sekula's Fish Story and the Thawing of Postmodernism, Bill Roberts, Tate Papers.

• Allan Sekula Archive, Getty Research Institute.

• Gestes de la pêche en Afrique occidentale française : les photographies d'Anita Conti (1899-1997) au musée national de la Marine, Marine Désormeau, e-Phaïstos, 2025 (in French).

• Anita Conti, The Lady of the Sea, Frontiers, 2020.

• Fish Story, Allan Sekula, digitised book, Internet Archive.

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