He “did not believe his eyes”. In the forest, a spot, yellow and massive. Nothing to do with what usually fascinates Cédric Schell, a 25-year-old Alsatian photographer, devoted to ruined fortified castles, perched high in the northern Vosges. For four years, he has gone in search of lost buildings that he likes to sublimate by photographing them in the very early morning, when they are still immersed in mist. “I’m often called the King of the Mist,” he smiles. Rocks, castles, clouds, leaden skies, fog, beautiful light. “I really try to photograph rare moments, which people are not used to seeing”, explains the image hunter. But in this whole end of october, it’s a completely different subject that has honored his work as a semi-professional photographer, and by extension, in light of these Alsatian landscapes that he loves so much. At the turn of a path, as if fallen from the sky, that of a yellow tram, dating from another time, placed for a long time near a pond, out of sight.
Located “near a path, not necessarily the most traveled in the sector”, towards “home” in Wissembourg, north of the Bas-Rhin, a stone’s throw from the German border. This meeting and the photo posted on his Instagram account would “mark” his young career as a photographer. “A great story, an upheaval in my life because it’s not every day that we get so much media coverage, on TV, on the radios and in newspapers in France, even in Germany, underlines Cédric Schell. I am used to being alone on my castles, close to nature and overnight, people talk about me as if I had discovered the treasure of the region! (laughter)”.
If he usually takes photographs for tourist offices, winter landscapes, museums or places accessible to tourists, it is this unusual photo of a tram in a forest that caught the attention, in particular that of social networks.
“I had never heard of or seen a photo of this tram. However, people have told me that they have passed it fifteen times. Finding something so out of the ordinary is still great,” rejoices Cédric Schell, who took this shot when he was going to photograph a pond for the tourist office. “Sometimes you have to think outside the box to rediscover things like that, which you don’t expect. “Not hidden, easily accessible, but near a” path that does not lead to much, because there is no rock, no point of view “, explains the photographer.
A “shattering” message that lifts the veil
Shared for the first time on social networks, the photo of the tram taken in the middle of the day, without fog therefore, immediately met with great success. A runaway that aroused the enthusiasm of the media and finally made it possible to “recover the whole story of this find. Finally, it is the story of the wagon that came back to me. Many people wondered why there was this wagon in the middle of the forest and others gave me the answers. Former employees of the Compagnie des transports strasbourgeois (CTS), tram enthusiasts have sent me messages. It’s a 1908 tram, revamped as a wagon in 1930 for the end of its career in 1960, when Strasbourg got rid of all its trams. The tram wasn’t yellow like that. It had to be repainted afterwards, says the photographer. Originally, it was a little ocher in color. »
Carried by the interest in this “discovery”, Cédric Schell therefore returned to take a series of photos, with his trademark this time, the mist, but also the help of smoke bombs. It was then that he received a “shattering” message. “One person told me the end of the story. It was his grandfather who had brought the tram to the forest on a trailer in the 1960s.” The e-mail recalled that part of the CTS trams had been “destroyed, burned, but others had been sold” to individuals. Buying a tram is what the grandfather of the author of the message had done and “as the land belonged to him, just like the pond he had dug for canoeing, continues Cédric Schell, he used it as a shelter” for his fragile boats. The author of the message recalled also remembering “having played in the carcass, forty years ago, with the tram driver… The world is small, underlines Cédric Schell. It is really something to have been so contacted. The story is closed and the answers, which I didn’t think I had, are given. »
For the time being, the wagon, which may be experiencing “a little too much media coverage” according to the author of the photo, remains in the forest, even if a certain museum in the sector seems to be interested in it… also worry that it is subject to some voluntary degradation, hoping that the forest does not close definitively on this last journey in time.