She photographs flowers the way one paints the portrait of the living. Under Laetitia Prieur’s lens, every petal seems inhabited by a will of its own. An umbel of wild carrot, set against a black ground, takes on the bearing of a queen. And the photographer, after years spent lending her eye to others, at last signs a book for herself alone.

The gesture does not come naturally. Trained in fine art and art history, she began a thesis on the technical capacities of the photographic medium, and on how our editing choices obey norms we never think to question. The years pass, one commission following another: portraits, still lifes for jewelers and leather-goods houses.

Until a mentorship in photographic writing pushed her to listen to her own longings. It is in the Cantal, the land of her childhood, of her father, and of her grandparents, that she gives free rein to her remembrances. Photographing a familiar place requires, in her words, “unlearning what one believes one knows, so as to see things anew.”

Having gone to live elsewhere, she returns with a gaze that no longer discovers but recognizes. Fifteen years of images, taken between 2010 and 2025, bear witness to this relearning within a collection bearing an evocative title, Le Saisissement — the seizure. It speaks of a hesitation: to seize, in the sense of understanding, and to be seized, in spite of oneself, by surprise.

The trade is never entirely forgotten. Film or digital, it hardly matters: “it depends on what I have to hand”; only the lens counts, a macro lens for photographing flowers and “getting a nice blur.” The book itself was built like a musical score: strong images, and between them, softer breaths to hold them together.

Hitchcock, she says, always wanted weaker passages in a film, to set off the stronger ones; she composed her own narrative the same way. The pages proceed by sedimentation. A car asleep beneath the dust of a barn, a globe ringed in darkness, a piece of family china: every object retains the imprint of the past.

In a still life of a glass of milk and a mandarin, a homage to the Flemish painting she cherishes, the blacksmith grandfather’s horseshoe frames a child in a white dress. One would swear it was the photographer as a girl. It is nothing of the kind: the image was slipped in there “to make one believe.” The album allows itself its fictions.

Rises a small old landscape photo of the Cantal, torn, then mended with adhesive tape. In the work of the philosopher and art historian Georges Didi-Huberman, whom she reads closely, creation is born of a “tear,” a wrenching-away from the continuous thread of time; hers, here, is literal. One does not restore time: one darns it.

At the heart of the book a volcano smolders. On the cover, a chrysanthemum sleeps beneath ash, which also covers, further on, a pear cut in two. Frost, for its part, rims the winter foliage. Identity, says the photographer, is built “in successive layers, like a palimpsest”: ash, frost, down to the fumarole deposits that seal the rock.

In the texts that punctuate the book, the eruption becomes an initiatory dream: “I walked upon their burnt lips, their fingers of fire marked me for life.” Laetitia Prieur writes this prose poetry herself, she who once swore she could not write. To find the tone, she reread “all of Jean Genet, all of Bukowski”: writings that restore things to sight. “Written images,” in her own words.

Hers advances under a mask: “a way of staying a little hidden, of not saying things quite so frankly.” A small modesty, which gives the book its rightful distance. The memento mori is never far away. An animal skull emerges from the black, a skull ring gleams on a finger resting against a stemmed glass, and stacked tires suggest the eye of an elephant, or a whale.

Four spreads, at the heart of the book, take its full measure. Two water pistols forgotten in the grass, then a dead grass snake on the asphalt. A country childhood learns of death early, and tames it through play. The artist’s sister, whom she calls “my counterpoint, the face of this story,” moves through the book as an alter ego.

She appears here from behind, two interlaced revolvers tattooed beneath her shoulder blades. Petals of pale pink, studded with droplets, close the sequence like a balm. Flowers, again. In a field of daisies, the boundary gives way: “I no longer know where they begin, I no longer know where I end.” Grass cut on a summer morning gives off “a scent of tender crime.”

The object itself was conceived like the images. A deliberately soft cover stock, and a bodoni spine to let the images open wide, cinemascope-style. Laetitia Prieur wanted a book that opens “like a western, with great landscapes you can throw wide open.” This unfolding spine replays, she says, her own “tear,” a mise en abyme, down to the binding itself, of the book’s construction.

The interiors answer to the gardens. Bathrooms tiled in midnight blue, doors ajar onto rooms sunk in half-light, wallpaper where roses climb, their stems “entwined like secrets”: the childhood home, revisited, tightens the stomach ever so gently. Everything there is familiar; nothing is quite certain.

“Inside houses, flowers never wilt,” she writes; it is their eternity that unsettles. To return is to measure a gap between the child who crowned herself “queen of nothing, but queen all the same,” and the adult who knows what kingdoms are worth. “It’s the wind that tells me I must grow up, or maybe it says nothing at all, and it’s up to me to invent it.”

Her definition of photography rests on a practitioner’s observation: in a film camera, “the only image you never see is precisely the one you’re taking,” the instant the mirror flips up and tips the present into the past. The artist replays this reversal, guided by “the fundamental need to try to understand [her] own being in the world, in order to find an intimacy that touches the universal.”

Then the narrative grows calm. A waterfall shimmers with a rainbow: of childhood, wonder also remains. “Time has passed, and scars become stories to tell,” writes Laetitia Prieur, before returning to the present, “sitting at the edge of a world that no longer exists.” The fire has withdrawn from things. “And the volcanoes are nothing more than mountains.”

This saisissement, at bottom, is a creative seizure: fear, once passed through, becomes matter, and the light was.

Le saisissement, photographs and texts by Laetitia Prieur, 144 pages, printed in an edition of 300 copies on Gardapat Kiara paper, printed by Escourbiac.

Laetitia Prieur, What Remains of the Volcanoes