INVISIBLE

NICOLAS FLOC'H

Extract from the text Walking into the depths by Muriel Enjalran, 2020

The underwater space, long inaccessible and fantasised, has been slow to establish itself within the typology of landscapes, which have focused on the representation of the surface of seas and oceans. Mythological and literary narratives have constructed the image of a world haunted by monstrous figures (Kraken, Leviathan). The illustrations for Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, by Alphonse de Neuville, popularised the image of phantasmagorical flora and fauna discovered by adventurers in diving suits. Chapter XVI, ‘Strolling the Plains’, describes, in encyclopaedic detail, a colourful and kaleidoscopic world of flowers, rocks, plantlets, shells and polyps.

The multiple explorations – perfectly equipped (manned submersibles, scuba divers) and methodical research (sampling, follow-up studies) – have enabled a better understanding of the environment (biodiversity, habitats, reliefs, bodies of water), although they concern only ten percent of the oceans. From the understanding to the necessary recognition of an ‘underwater seascape’ as a place of contemplation and in need of protection, there is a long way to go. Alongside researchers, Nicolas Floc’h, in his capacity as an artist, has been actively contributing to this work of recognition for the last ten years, through his remarkable photographic inventory of different marine environments, with the projects Structures productives (‘Productive Structures’), and Paysages productifs (‘Productive Seascapes’), made up of the series Initium Maris (2018-2021), La couleur de l’eau (‘The Colour of Water’) (2016-2021), Ouessant (2016), Kuroshio (2017), Bulles (‘Bubbles’) (2019) and Invisible (2018-2020).

The Invisible project, initiated and conceived by the artist in connection with his research on the productivity of ecosystems, proposes an inventory of the Calanques National Park; it reveals the anthropogenic pressures weighing on marine biodiversity through an assertive artistic and aesthetic approach to the construction and representation of the underwater seascape. The commission for the park is an extension and validation of a personal creative work that will itself constitute a resource for scientists and enrich their perception of underwater ecosystems through images. In this way, Nicolas Floc’h contributes to reviving the dialogue between art and science.

The context of the commission thereby enables him to galvanise his creative work, following in the footsteps of photographers who came into their own by being included in public surveys in the past, the objective of which was to document known territories (Heliographic mission, Datar1 for France), as well as the unknown (American exploratory missions to the Wild West in the last years of the 19th century).

Photographers such as William Henry Jackson (Hayden survey) or John K. Hillers (Powell survey) contributed to shaping the American imagination of the Rockies.

These surveys strongly contributed to the preservation of natural environments. With the help of geographers, the photographs of W. H. Jackson and Timothy O’Sullivan raised awareness amongst the general public and weighed on the decision by theAmerican Congress to create the first national park, Yellowstone, in 1872. Inspired by their heritage, Robert Adams and members of the American movement of ‘New Topographers’ documented in the 1970s the deterioration of the natural environment caused by human activity, as the photographers Raymond Depardon, Josef Koudelka and others did in France when commissioned in 1984 by the Datar to record the transformations of the regions. Their photographs of abandoned factories, the countryside overrun with pylons, blocks of flats surrounded by interchanges and viaducts, consolidated the idea that art photography irreplaceably reveals the truth of a territory. Nicolas Floc’h extends and completes the territorial inventory initiated by the Datar in a unique way by photographing coastal seabeds.

Nicolas Floc’h’s seascapes are in black and white, like the first shots taken underwater by the biologist Louis Boutan.2 In 1893, Boutan photographed his colleague in a diving suit, thereby inaugurating a cliché of underwater iconography, based on a narrative that features and focuses on the character of the diver exploring the mystery of the underworld. Although the biologist paved the way for a representation of submarine seascapes with the famous photograph, taken at the Baie des Elmes in 1898, of an underwater ‘thicket’ indicated by a little sign, it was still only considered anecdotally and not yet as a subject in its own right. With a very precise shooting protocol – a predetermined diving itinerary, geo-localisation and an inventory of shots taken at regular intervals with a wide-angle lens and in natural light, without seeking out a human or animal presence – the artist breaks with this narrative tradition to produce images that are loaded with his own singular experience and to render these environments as truthfully as possible.

Nicolas Floc’h follows in the footsteps of great conceptual artists who took natural environments as the subject and the object of their artistic research. The images therefore allow him to convey a particular relationship to the environment contained in the practice of freediving, in the same way that walking
is an essential vector of creation for artists such as Hamish Fulton. Diving, like walking, becomes a work of art in its own right. For Nicolas Floc’h, as for the British artist, the aim is to make audiences experience the feeling of a solitary foray into the natural environment by way of their artistic objects, ‘artefacts’ which take different forms (sculpture, installations and photography). 

This tension between the incommunicable nature of an experience and the profound desire to communicate it is the driving force for Hamish Fulton, for whom art is valid only if it can be experienced and activated by the audience. The aphorism, ‘without external embodiment, an experience remains incomplete’ could also apply to Nicolas Floc’h who, through exhibitions, books and talks, is fundamentally committed to conveying this feeling to audiences. It is no coincidence that

the Invisible project has taken the form of a public commission. Although these experiences in natural environments are characterised by their silence, text and words also hold a particular significance for both artists. We find them superimposed over the photographs of the ‘walking artist’, and in the form of captions accompanying the photographs of the ‘diving artist’. These texts consist of factual data which relate, for the former, to the site, the length of the walk, its duration, direction and dates, and for the latter, to the temperature of the water, its cloudiness, pH, depth, area, site, and year. Finally, walking, like diving, is for both an engaged artistic experience, which generates changes: ‘Walking transforms, to walk is to resist’, says Hamish Fulton. These activities can also become meditative experiences, when the body is subjected to pressure and a lack of oxygen at high altitude or underwater. By pushing against mental and physical limits, they open up new perspectives on the spaces that are being explored. […] 

Although the form of his inventory of underwater flora and habitats in panoramic shots differs from the macroscopic approach of Blossfeldt’s herbariums, Nicolas Floc’h demonstrates this same desire to produce knowledge and enrich perceptions of these environments through a mechanism of empathy: the expressivity of these underwater worlds triggers a sense of landscape in the individuals who look at them. The subjective therefore becomes collective.

The history of landscape in art is informed by all kinds of cultural and subjective approaches, which are all part of an ‘artilisation’ of Nature. Landscape is no longer a frame, but a work in its own right, and therefore helps transform material elements into living symbols. Through this representation of the essential quality of seascapes, in all of their singularity, stripped of any interfering narrative, the work encourages us to experience insight, to embrace a reflection that combines wonder at the emergence of new seascapes and an awareness of the environmental urgency. 

1. Founded in 1963, the Inter- ministerial Delegation of Regional development (Datar) launched a series of artistic, photographic commissions between 1984 and 1989, the aim of which was to “represent the French landscape of the 1980s”. The initiative became known as “the Datar photographic survey”.

2. Louis Boutan (1859-1934) was a French biologist and photographer, the author of the first known underwater photograph, taken in 1893 at Banyuls-sur-Mer with a camera in a sealed box.

3. Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Vol. 1/ chap. XVII, “An Underwater Forest”, J. Hetzel et Cie, 1870, p. 126.