Landscapes of Haute-Saintonge in Charente-Maritime, France, in Black and White

In Haute-Saintonge, I learned to listen.

This land in the south of Charente-Maritime in France is not spectacular in the obvious sense. It does not impose itself. It whispers. And it is precisely in that whisper that I found my voice as a photographer.

When I walk along the ponds at dawn, wrapped in mist, I feel as if I am entering a suspended world. The water becomes a mirror without edges. The trees dissolve into silence. The reeds draw delicate calligraphies against the pale sky. Everything slows down. Everything breathes more deeply. In those moments, I do not seek to capture a landscape. I seek to inhabit it.

Silence here is not emptiness. It is presence. A dense, almost sacred presence. It settles on the surface of the ponds like a veil, softens the underwood, and erases the unnecessary. In black and white, I strip the scene of distraction so that only structure, light, and emotion remain. Color can be seductive; monochrome is truthful. It reveals the bones of the world.

In the depth of the underwood, I often feel as though I am walking through a cathedral shaped by time. Branches arch overhead like vaults. Paths disappear into luminous clearings. Light filters through leaves in fragile beams, sculpting the air itself. Nature composes without intention, yet with absolute mastery. A fallen branch resting in still water becomes a line of pure tension. A cluster of trees emerging from fog becomes a silent gathering. A simple track in the forest turns into a passage toward the unknown.

My creative process begins long before I raise the camera. It begins with attention. With patience. With the willingness to wait for the moment when the landscape reveals its inner geometry. I return to the same places again and again, because I know that beauty is not fixed. It is born from encounter - between light and shadow, between movement and stillness, between what is seen and what is felt.

Haute-Saintonge is dear to me because it has shaped this way of seeing. Its ponds have taught me reflection. Its mists have taught me humility. Its forests have taught me depth. Here, I understood that photography is not about imposing a vision, but about receiving one. The shapes that emerge - the silhouettes of trees, the delicate tracery of branches, the mirrored symmetry of water - are gifts. I simply recognize them.

Through this gallery, I wish to share more than images. I wish to share a state of mind. An invitation to slow down. To look beyond the surface. To discover how nature, in its quiet power, creates forms more profound than any human design.

For those who live with my prints, I hope these landscapes become spaces of contemplation - windows into silence. For those who wish to explore photography more deeply, I hope these images reveal that the essential lies not in technical complexity, but in presence. In attention. In the courage to embrace simplicity.

In the end, my work in Haute-Saintonge is a dialogue - between myself and the land, between shadow and light, between the visible world and the invisible emotion it carries. And in that dialogue, I continue to learn how to see.