Éric Bourret

For Éric Bourret, landscape is never still: it is an experience, a duration, a transformation. Since the late 1990s, the artist has developed a photographic practice grounded in walking, the physical experience of territory, and the inscription of time within the image. “The landscapes I move through, and that move through me, constitute who I am,” Éric Bourret states. This reciprocity between body and world lies at the heart of his practice. Walking becomes a way of looking, but also of allowing oneself to be transformed by what one traverses. Lasting from several days to several months, his journeys engage the body in a sustained relationship with territories - from the primary forests of Sumatra to the Himalayan ranges. Movement is not a means of reaching a landscape; it is the very condition of its perception. Landscape thus becomes less a subject than a lived experience. This relationship to duration takes form through a singular photographic process: while walking, multiple exposures are superimposed onto a single negative or, in the artist’s digital works, within a single file. In place of the capture of an instant, Bourret offers an accumulation of moments. Multiple perceptions, bodily positions, states of light and atmospheric conditions settle into a single image. Time is no longer what precedes the image. It becomes its material. Through this stratification, forms shift, double, fade or emerge. Contours lose their stability. Landscape appears in a state of continuous transformation, as though traversed by the movements that have shaped it. The image no longer seeks to fix a place, but to make perceptible a relationship between gaze, body and world. Photography thus becomes a temporal experience. It does not merely document a territory: it condenses its duration. Between appearance and disappearance, stability and movement, it brings forth almost imperceptible variations - those that elude a conception of photography as the capture of an instant. This openness to time is accompanied by an openness to contingency. Technical accidents, meteorological variations, shifts in light and unforeseen events are not corrected; they participate in the formation of the work. The unpredictable becomes an active force within the image, introducing a tension between intention and chance, control and surrender. For Bourret, to photograph is therefore to accept that an image may remain open. The work takes shape within this unstable space, where reality resists its own representation. Far removed from both the conventions of documentary photography and the aesthetics of spectacle, his work proposes another relationship to territory: not to look at it as an image already constituted, but to experience it as a material in the process of becoming. Body, walking and duration become the instruments of a photography that does not seek to possess the world, but to enter into relation with it. Since the late 1990s, Éric Bourret’s work has been presented in numerous exhibitions in France and internationally. His works have entered museum collections across Asia, Europe, North and South America, and Africa, including those of the Finnish Museum of Photography in Helsinki, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Tamaulipas in Mexico, the Musée d’Art Moderne et d’Art Contemporain in Nice, the Centre d’Arts et de Nature at Chaumont-sur-Loire, the Musée d’Art Contemporain in Marseille, the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris, the Musée Picasso in Antibes, and the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris. His work has notably been presented at the 56th Venice Biennale, the Shenzhen Art Museum and the Xie Zilong Art Museum in China, Joburg Contemporary African Art in South Africa, the Espace de l’Art Concret in Mouans-Sartoux, the Centre de la Vieille Charité in Marseille, and the MuMa - Musée d’art moderne André Malraux in Le Havre. For Bourret, photographing landscape does not mean bringing it to a halt, but revealing what, within it, continues to become.