Born from the collaboration between the Photothèque of the Muséum de Toulouse and Éditions Païen, directed by Lia Pradal who works to restore life and substance to iconographic archival collections, Chambre noire, Archive blanche is built from more than 1,400 glass plates, prints, and negatives made by Eugène Trutat between 1860 and 1910. The book offers a contemporary reading of the corpus of the photographer and mountaineer, who was already documenting, more than a century ago, the melting of the Pyrenean glaciers.
The whiteness of the ice seems to freeze each image and offer a glimpse of a bygone time. As the pages turn, the Pyrenees, like the images themselves, seem to crumble, melt, and evaporate until they disappear entirely.
The book closes with the premonitory words of the geographer Élisée Reclus:
“For our sons’ great-grandchildren, in the indefinite distance of centuries, the picture will have changed. Perhaps the glacier, then completely melted, will be replaced by a weak stream; the mountain itself will have ceased to exist.”
