01 — What Remains of Seeing

WHAT REMAINS OF SEEING — LAC D’ANNECY

Lac d’Annecy, France
Analogue black-and-white photography
Agfa Billy Record
ILFORD HP5 Plus 400
Self-developed in R09, 1+100, 60 min
Hand-printed in the darkroom on Fomaspeed
Silver gelatin print
30 × 40.5 cm

Several moments seem to coexist within a single photographic space.

Boats, bathers, mountains, water and vegetation appear with different degrees of visibility. Some figures remain clearly present, while others become translucent — almost traces left behind by an earlier moment.

Through superimposition, the photograph no longer fixes an instant. Time accumulates within the image. Bodies appear and disappear, the landscape doubles, and the distinction between observation and memory becomes uncertain.

The photograph becomes less a record of what was there than an exploration of what remains after seeing — fragments of presence suspended between perception, memory and disappearance.

01.1 — WHAT REMAINS OF SEEING

Analogue black-and-white photography
Hasselblad 500 C/M
ILFORD HP5 Plus 400
Self-developed in R09, 1+100, 60 min
Hand-printed in the darkroom on Fomaspeed
Silver gelatin print · 30 × 40.5 cm

Produced from the same roll of film as What Remains of Seeing, this photograph extends the investigation of landscape through superimposition, reversal and uncertainty.

Several moments appear to occupy the same photographic surface. Water, mountain, vegetation, figures and reflections overlap without settling into a single coherent space. The landscape remains recognizable, yet its orientation becomes unstable: foreground and background exchange places, solid forms become transparent, and different moments of seeing seem to coexist.

The negative state introduces another transformation. Light and darkness no longer behave according to our habitual reading of the world. What should recede may advance; what should appear illuminated becomes dark. The photograph therefore asks the eye to reconstruct what it sees while simultaneously preventing that reconstruction from becoming complete.

Human figures remain visible, but only as small traces within a much larger field of overlapping perceptions. They appear almost suspended between different exposures and different moments.

Here, the negative is not simply an intermediate photographic material waiting to become positive. It becomes another possible image — another way of seeing the same world.

The photograph no longer asks only, What was there?

It asks instead:

What remains when seeing itself becomes uncertain?

01.2 — What Remains of Seeing

Presence / Erasure

Five people are seated around a round table in a garden. Yet this simple, almost familiar scene has become difficult to grasp. Bodies overlap with the table, faces dissolve into grain, and the surrounding garden seems to pass through the figures.

The use of expired film plays an essential role in this transformation. Its instability — grain, irregular density, loss of detail and unpredictable tonal shifts — interrupts the descriptive function of photography. What was originally a gathering of four people becomes something closer to a fragment of memory.

The figures are there, but they are already disappearing.

Rather than correcting these accidents, I accept them as part of the photographic image. The expired emulsion introduces its own history and its own passage of time between the moment photographed and the image that finally appears.

Here, photography does not preserve the moment intact. It reveals how an image can survive while its certainty disappears.

What remains is not exactly what was seen, but the trace of having seen.

Hasselblad 500 c/M · Carl Zeiss Planar 80 mm f/2.8 · expired Lomography Berlin 400 · ILFOSOL 3 · analogue photography · self-developed film

01.4 — What Remains of Seeing

Self-Portrait in a Garden

A figure stands at the edge of a garden, close to a pile of branches and wood gathered to be burned. It is a self-portrait, yet the body does not dominate the photograph. Instead, it seems caught inside the material instability of the image.

The figure appears on the left, partially defined and partially erased. The upper body remains recognizable, while the legs gradually dissolve into the pale surface below. Behind and across the figure, branches, vegetation and landscape overlap. The large luminous area at the centre almost destroys conventional depth: foreground and background collapse into one another.

What particularly interests me here is the relationship between the body and the branches. The wood is no longer simply an object lying in the garden. Its lines spread across the photograph like marks made directly on the paper — scratches, gestures, almost a drawing. The photographic image begins to behave like a drawn surface.

And there is another beautiful tension: the wood has been gathered in anticipation of fire. It is material waiting to disappear, while photography traditionally attempts to preserve what has existed. The self-portrait stands between these two conditions — preservation and disappearance.

The expired film reinforces this uncertainty. Its irregular densities, veiling and tonal accidents are not simply defects to be corrected. They become active elements of the image. The photograph no longer describes the garden faithfully; it records the instability of seeing it.

The self-portrait therefore becomes less a representation of myself than a trace of my presence within a landscape already undergoing transformation.

Hasselblad 500 c/M · Carl Zeiss Planar 80 mm f/2.8 · expired Lomography Berlin 400 · ILFOSOL 3 · analogue photography · self-developed film

01.5 — What Remains of Seeing

After the Figure

The same garden remains, the same accumulation of branches and wood, but the human figure is absent.

Without the body, the photograph becomes more radical. The pile of branches occupies the centre of the image as a large luminous mass, almost impossible to identify at first sight. The landscape survives around its edges — trees, distant hills, grass — while the centre seems to have been consumed by light.

The branches are particularly striking. Some remain sharply outlined against the darker sky; others dissolve into the pale central field. They begin to resemble drawn lines, scratches or marks on a sheet of paper rather than photographed objects. Photography approaches drawing once again.

Placed immediately after 01.4, the two images establish a beautiful relationship. In 01.4, my body stood beside this material, itself partially disappearing into the image. In 01.5, the body has vanished altogether. Only the site remains.

Yet the absence does not feel empty. On the contrary, the missing figure becomes perceptible precisely because we have seen it in the preceding photograph.

This creates a sequence:

presence → disappearance → trace.

The instability of the expired film becomes especially meaningful here. The pale veil, irregular density and near-erasure of the centre do not simply obscure the subject; they transform the photographed world into something between landscape, memory and photographic matter.