From the Camargue to Patagonia, Axelle de Russé and Théo Giacometti Hold the Line

IN IMAGES

An ocean divides them, yet Axelle de Russé and Théo Giacometti are photographing two embattled territories, both threatened by rising waters.

By Guénola Pellen. Photos by Axelle de Russé & Théo Giacometti.

Icebound Patagonia and the salt-flats of the Camargue share neither climate nor language. And yet Axelle de Russé and Théo Giacometti are tracking down a common essence in both places: that of edgelands, landscapes worked over by wind and salt, by myth, and by the diffuse sense of a vanishing yet to come. Their images refuse the dry statement of documentary in favor of drift, of suspension, that murky zone where the real and the dreamed sometimes bleed into one another.

Drawn to little-documented territories, Axelle de Russé works within the tradition of the photographer-explorer. Since 2016 she has been photographing Puerto Williams, in Chilean Patagonia, billed as the southernmost city on earth, in a kind of echo of Longyearbyen in the Norwegian Arctic. Infrared film tints the trees a muted red there, drawing the planet’s two opposite poles visually closer together.

“When the salt has stiffened our hair and our hands,” writes Théo Giacometti of Axelle de Russé’s images, “when the sailors’ songs hold no more secrets for us, then we can let ourselves slip under, sink into the hallucinated landscapes of her Patagonia, a ghost-land she rouses with her love and delivers back to us complete with its exiles, its myths, and this way of declaring: we are still here.”

In his portraits of gauchos and exiles, Théo Giacometti, a regular contributor to the press, unfolds the full range of a personal artistic practice attentive to the ties between landscape, memory, narrative, and human presence. In the Camargue, he has been building Pour qui chanteront les sirènes (For Whom the Sirens Will Sing), a story born of an artificial land woven together from dikes between the Rhône and the Mediterranean. Medium-format film imposes its own grain, its silences, its slowness.

“You plunge into Théo Giacometti’s images as into deep water,” says Axelle de Russé, comparing his Camargue portraits to hers. “I see the same faces, the same expressions of those who are viscerally bound to a territory, who have become one with it, their fates tied together in sorrow. These are lands one does not leave, ‘for better or for worse.'”

The two artists had read each other’s work before exhibiting together. To describe the wind that batters Navarino Island, Théo Giacometti calls on the Chilean writer Francisco Coloane. Facing a Camargue horseman, Axelle de Russé finds again the faces of Puerto Williams. The same set of the mouth crosses both hemispheres, the same rootedness in a territory that the women and men they photograph inhabit with their whole being, body and soul alike.

Neither yields to dread: from Patagonia to the Camargue, beauty is a choice. A way of protecting what one loves by showing it as desirable rather than as already lost. Their two worlds converged in Paris, at La Maison des Photographes, for an exhibition in June 2026 titled “Et après, la mer” (“And After, the Sea”). The water keeps advancing, and they will keep documenting these last strongholds of resistance at the crumbling edge of a world.