Watchlights
post-extractivism, mountains, slow photography, water
https://fr.ulule.com/veilleuses/
SEEKING IMAGES FOR WHAT IS DISAPPEARING
Watchlights is the dream of a photographic and poetic expedition in the Southern Alps, in a high mountain territory where water is becoming scarce and where climate change redraws the contours of the landscape.
It is the idea of a solitary, slow, attentive crossing — a walk between the lakes, springs, and streams of the Queyras, in search of what still resists: traces of life, imprints of a geological, vegetal, or human memory.
I plan to travel with a large format camera turned into a pinhole, sensitive paper, wild plants to make my developers, a nomadic lab under a tent. To experiment with a handcrafted photography, battery-free, extraction-free, where each image becomes a vigil, a ritual of care addressed to the mountains.
WHY THE QUEYRAS? AND WHY NOW?
It was during an unexpected hike to Lake Sainte-Anne, on Ascension Day (ironically enough), that something clicked.
It wasn’t planned or prepared: just an inner calling, exhaustion, a need for air.
Up there, among rocks and scree, I found a silent place filled with signs. Everything I carry — photography, mountains, the fragility of life, the search for meaning — crystallized. That lake became a threshold.
It was no longer just a walk: it was a quiet initiation.
It showed me how I wanted to walk, look, gather, reveal. That’s where Watchlights began.
Since then, I have gradually built an itinerary through these mountains.
They bear no traces of brutal extraction, but they suffer from more diffuse pressures: water regulation, tourism, climate change, the abandonment of certain agricultural practices...
Watchlights would be a first gesture: the development of a protocol of observation and creation, tracking life forms in a changing landscape shaped by climate transformations, human use, and ecological tension.
A milestone to follow the red thread of my ongoing research and to later expand it to other territories.
It is not about producing spectacular mountain imagery.
But to create inhabited images, formed by the very conditions of their emergence. Images like fireflies — fragile, fleeting, but persistent.
A POETIC AND ECOLOGICAL INVESTIGATION
This work draws on my modest personal research in political ecology, sensory geography, and anthropology of life.
It explores:
- The transformations of high-altitude environments: snowmelt, dried-up springs, loss of biodiversity
- The way landscapes hold latent memories: geological, human, symbolic
- The fragile life forms that persist in the quiet folds of the territory
I hope to explore these spaces to observe what fades, what endures, what returns.
But more than that, I want to question what it means to make images today, in a damaged world.
What can we still show without contributing to the wear of forms, of the world itself?
I seek faint, fragmentary images that gather rather than capture.
Through photographs developed using local plants, I hope to reveal an ecology of nuance, fragility, and the invisible.
To shift the paradigm: from extraction, proof, or appropriation to gesture, survival, and guardianship. To illuminate small glimmers in the night of the mountains — not to light the way, but to accompany.
WATER AS REVELATOR
In The Poetics of Water, Jean-Philippe Pierron makes a lucid observation: we have stopped living water. It has become a volume to control, a resource to distribute, an anonymous flow to manage. In this utilitarian reduction, we have lost the symbolic, sensory, and intimate connection we once had with it.
With Watchlights, I aim to rekindle that link. Water will not only flow through the Queyras streams: it will be the very developer of my images, collected on site and mixed with local plants. It will become part of the photographic matter, a living memory of the territory, slow, fluid, and unpredictable.
By learning to live water again — to listen to it, touch it, wait for its rhythm — I will attempt a poetic gesture of repair. For if water reveals images, it also reveals a different way of inhabiting the world: not as a master, but as a guest.
In short, this project crosses:
- a field gesture: to explore, to walk, to keep watch
- a radical photographic gesture: to make images without a modern camera, with plants and light
- a poetic gesture: to gather what remains, what slips away, what appears only briefly
- a political gesture: to oppose extraction, profit, and speed, and propose a new relation to images and the living
WHAT I WOULD LIKE TO DO IN PRACTICE
During five days in the Queyras, I aim to:
- Visit high-altitude lakes and springs: Cordes, Sainte-Anne, Sainte-Marguerite, Miroir, Longet, Sources of the Guil...
- Photograph only with a pinhole camera: no lens, no battery, a single light opening
- Make my own plant-based developers: nettle, yarrow, tansy, St. John's wort...
- Set up a mobile tent-based lab, under red light, often at night
- Develop the images in water from local springs, streams, and lakes
- Keep a field notebook, collect water, note species, altitudes, silences...
- Connect what I see, what I feel, and what I fear will vanish
- Conduct a poetic investigation into what resists in the quiet folds of the landscape, a field-based experience held with gentle rigor, like a ritual of mourning and care for what fades, what persists, what transforms
I aim to document less a landscape than the state of a world.
Less summits than thresholds.
Less answers than signs.
Watchlights is not a heroic expedition.
It is a humble, inhabited, fragile journey.
A way to inhabit mountains differently.
To photograph differently.
To resist, by caring.
To keep watch, simply.