Temps Présent 20th of June 2023

TEMPS PRÉSENT

PHOTOGRAPHING THE HORIZON OF THE WORLD

When photography appeared, it quietly freed painting from its duty to document reality, allowing it to become a field of sensations, vibrations and lived time. A century and a half ago, painters left their studios to work outdoors, capturing not only landscapes but the very duration of their presence before them. Today I ask myself: how might photography answer that same intuition, that urge to go beyond the still image?

In January 2023, on the Normandy coast, I pointed my large-format camera at the horizon, thinking of Renoir’s Sunset, View of Guernsey, never suspecting that it would steer my work toward what I now call “realistic abstraction.” Sky and sea became my subjects: a matter that holds visible time. From sunrise to sunset, I recorded every change, adjusting exposure, aperture and shutter speed to let in an even light. The blue of dawn, the white of noon, the violet of dusk: each carried the same weight. Temps Présent answers a silent question, “What color was the sky today?”, a question that quietly unravels the myth of a single, stable reality.

This somatic vision of color, which gives every moment the same weight, is both performative and meditative. The resulting images are fields of color born in the darkroom, hues that never existed on their own in nature. They hold the invisible events of the day: reflections, clouds, waves, boats, passers-by, all present yet leaving no trace. The image becomes a palimpsest of the invisible.

I document everything: impressions, weather data, technical settings such as brightness, cloud cover and visibility. I compile them into vast tables, seeking to map the invisible workings of light. Yet no formula explains how film, pushed to its limits, produces these colors. These enigmatic data become the captions that accompany each photograph, like a scientist documenting a phenomenon through description. From the start, I have worked with researchers and artists, trying to understand the hidden logic of the darkroom. No one holds the answer, but this dialogue feeds the work.

Temps Présent eludes technical analysis, just as it eludes any comparison with painting, its sole source of inspiration. Its relationship to time? Perhaps that is not the question. Temps Présent is rooted in the world as it unfolds. Each image records an entire day within a changing frame: a synthesis of colors, not a snapshot. The horizon becomes both limit and bridge; the image, an amalgam of what the day holds and what it radiates. It expresses the tension between inner and outer, our relationship to reality, to what it contains while concealing it.

Tim Ingold, in Lines: A Brief History, writes:

“The living being is the place where atmospheric immersion turns into proliferating lines (...) This relationship, between lines and atmosphere, is fundamental to all animate life.”

Beyond the visible passage of time, these images carry an abstract charge: an attempt at permanence.

That is what I felt while photographing the Gulf of Mexico on January 7, 2025, the day the United States announced its intention to rename it. My camera, fixed in place for six days, faced north from the Yucatán, sweeping the horizon 11.3 km (7 miles) away. I did not know that California would soon burn, that a new president would be sworn in, that David Lynch would die. I saw no omens, only calm. I perceived only the wind, the waves, the silence. In the distance, photons bounced off moving surfaces; I recorded their accumulated frequencies. Each dusk confirmed it: another unique day had just passed. Light never repeats itself.

Recording the trials of the world, merged in time: this is the heart of the series. It must expand, building bridges between continents, beyond the horizon of everyday life, inviting contemplation and repositioning us as fleeting passengers. To recognize light as a common good. To see these images not as passive views but as calls to action, to reimagine ourselves as subjects, not spectators, in a political relationship with the world.