The brig and the dagger symbolize the marine commandos. For Largo you have to add a camera. After “Logbook of a marine commando”, the Lanesterian soldier has just released his second work with Mareuil Éditions. A reference book to unravel the mystery of the commandos, “showing everyday life because we stay in the shadows because we have to but we have to find the right balance otherwise no one will come”, explains Largo who, for security reasons uses a nickname and flees the objective. This is the aim of his book, to promote a universe that he embraced almost by chance at the age of 20, in 2002, even though he was planning to become a landscaper. “I wanted to travel, to escape and I had this white knight side who wants to defend the widow and the orphan, in the service of others, even if it means getting my hands dirty,” recalls the forty-year-old.
Largo goes to school for six months and completes the commando training course. “There were 132 of us at the start. We finished at 16,” he slips. What followed were internships: missions in Afghanistan, Chad, Mali, marine missions against drug trafficking, in the Caribbean, which he immortalized. He took up photography when he joined the commandos and discovered a photographer’s eye, a talent for framing which he supplemented with technical training. To show, without necessarily using words, what he experienced. “I wanted to make photo albums of each mission for my family, to keep a trace”, and then Louis Saillans, another marine commando, asked him for his images to illustrate his book “Chief of War” in 2021. His photos were popular in the eye of the publisher Louis de Mareuil who offered to publish his first work, then the second in 2024. “Le Brick et la dague”, compiles unpublished photos taken between 2021 and 2024, from Lorient to Toulon, photos of missions abroad too, older because the commando has become a trainer and aspires to become an instructor. Transmission is the whole purpose of Largo’s Books, “so that young people arrive with knowledge of the real life of commandos, not that which we see in the films”.
Show the commando skill set
From the birth of the marine commandos, to the training through the air, the sea, the land and the external missions, the soldier strives to “show the range of skills of the commandos and even then I cannot photograph everything that we do.” He assures us, all the photos are real. No staging, only reality, “so there are no, let’s say, delicate photos where you have to have a weapon in your hands rather than a camera.” Largo also writes about the commando spirit, its essential values in a society confronted with “racism, the fear of others”, “with us, the collective takes precedence over the individual”.
Informations
Books
Canada
