Material Territories - Écorce - At the Edge of Rupture

This series was shot in the olive groves of Cimiez, in Nice.
Each image pairs two photographs of the same tree, a colour image above, its black-and-white counterpart below. Joined along one horizontal line, they read as connected while staying slightly apart, as if each showed a different side of the same place.
I keep coming back to these trees. Their bark changes slowly, marked by growth, weather, time. The more I photograph them, the more they suggest unexpected links to the human body, folds, fractures and textures that echo skin without ever turning into a metaphor.
The back-and-forth between colour and black-and-white is part of that exploration. Instead of separating two versions of the same subject, it lets different ways of seeing the same surface sit side by side.
Écorce is less a study of olive trees than of what time leaves on living matter. The photographs stay rooted in observation, while leaving room for each viewer to draw their own connections.

Developed within the Unclearpicture collaboration with writer Michel Maurel