Atlas for L – PhMuseum

Facing blindness, L started cataloguing all the pieces she might see – garments, household albums, 16,000 telephone pictures. Now, along with her sight nearly gone, I take up the duty: constructing an atlas she will be able to carry into the darkish.

L has catalogued each merchandise of clothes she owns. Each piece carries a exact Pantone code, a factual description and a private mnemonic be aware – useful, vernacular texts that, learn collectively, type an intimate poetic archive of a life. A coat turns into a color swatch, a reminiscence, a small act of resistance towards forgetting. These self-generated paperwork – purposeful, tender, unusual – are the inspiration on which this venture is constructed.

Three years in the past, L discovered {that a} uncommon retinal illness was consuming her eyesight and that she would quickly be clinically blind. It was not her first ordeal. In 2011, a uncommon cardiac an infection led to 2 coronary heart transplants and a liver transplant inside 13 months. After a protracted and troublesome rehabilitation throughout which she needed to relearn to stroll and to talk, she discovered her method again to one thing resembling atypical life – till the prognosis got here. L’s pals raised cash so she might journey the world whereas it was nonetheless doable: the port of Senegal, the pyramids of Giza, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Caught simply in time, these pictures now dwell in her reminiscence and on her telephone.

As her blindness approached, I took on the duty of constructing an archive of her visible world. We started by photographing chosen gadgets of clothes – these whose mnemonic notes carry the strongest narrative cost. L additionally entrusted me with all the pieces saved on her telephone: 16,000 pictures and counting, which I’ve been organising into free, evocative typologies. In 2025, she invited me to her neighbourhood in Paris the place, following her directions, I photographed the faces, locations and particulars she’s going to now not be capable to see. My pictures are quiet and contemplative – an train in sustained consideration, as I give myself permission to look as if for the final time. A younger man picks up a tiny pebble on the native park. A black cat leads me to her proprietor. Shards of glass catch the late-afternoon solar from a gutter on L’s doorstep.

As these disparate supplies accumulate – screenshots and household images, memes and medical information, a rainbow glimpsed from a hospital window – an atlas has begun to take form. The atlas resists a single fastened type, and this resistance is a part of its argument: a dwelling archive that refuses simple organisation, the place the act of recognizing connections between issues is itself the first interpretive gesture. Every 12 months, for example, {a photograph} seems on L’s telephone of the Christmas tree at her grandmother’s home. Bringing these collectively in a grid is a minimal intervention, but it opens onto one thing greater – reminiscence, ritual, the imperceptible passage of time. This work asks what pictures are literally for: not solely as political or aesthetic objects, however as helpful, generative and generally important issues.

L’s need to distill and protect her world earlier than the encroaching darkness has parallels with the Golden Record – the disc of sounds and pictures launched aboard the Voyager spacecraft in 1977 as an archive of human life for an viewers which will by no means exist. As I started incorporating a few of the Golden Record pictures into L’s atlas, surprising resonances emerged: a Nineteen Seventies diagram exhibiting a cross-section of the Earth’s tectonic layers uncannily resembles a medical scan of her eye. 

My personal observe has lengthy been involved with the boundary between doc and invention, with how pictures assemble and warp the true. Working with L has introduced that query into sharper, extra pressing focus. Between 2020 and 2021, I used to be engaged by Magnum Photos to evaluation their total archive – almost a million pictures. That expertise educated in me a selected type of consideration: the flexibility to learn throughout huge our bodies of disparate materials, to determine latent construction, to permit pictures to talk to at least one one other throughout time. This is the methodology I carry to L’s atlas.

Atlas for L stays unresolved and ongoing. The PhMuseum grant would enable us to proceed our collaboration and push the work into new formal territory. Concretely, this implies increasing the atlas, deepening the documentation of L’s neighbourhood, and re-photographing her clothes in a managed studio setting with a stylist – giving the clothes archive the visible rigour it deserves whereas foregrounding the textual content which gives its emotional cost. It additionally means persevering with to experiment with how the atlas materialises as an object: whether or not as a lever arch file, a loose-leaf archive, an accordion construction, or one thing altogether tougher to categorise. The type continues to be being found.

Somewhere in all of this, L will take her final {photograph}. I really feel a accountability towards that second.

When she first noticed the route the work was taking, L stated: “I’m glad that my suffering has led to beauty.” It could seem paradoxical – even wasteful – to transcribe in such meticulous element the visible world of somebody who’s going blind. But L’s energy is infectious, and her venture has clarified one thing basic: that pictures will not be merely contingent or lovely, however obligatory. That the drive to see, to report and to protect is as human as another impulse we all know.

Perhaps sooner or later, as medication advances, L will regain her sight. If she does, this atlas will probably be ready for her.

Thank you in your consideration.