Mathieu Chaze, the Infinity of a Stream

Water never carves rock in a single motion. It polishes the stone day after day, patiently, until a precise form emerges. This mineral erosion runs beneath the surface of Song of Silent Water, published by the Bolognese house L’Artiere and edited by David Campany, writer and curator, one of the most influential voices in contemporary photography.

The patience of water is also that of a man. After fifteen years in London’s financial world, Mathieu Chaze left everything behind to devote himself to photography and to watching his two sons, Edward and Hugo, grow up. His first book, Rock, Paper, Scissors (2021), captured their childhood in their own kingdom, the English countryside where they were homeschooled.

Then the children grew up and went back to school. It is alone, now, that he walks the landscape, at home and elsewhere. “These photographs were made while walking,” the author notes, in a nod to the travelling photographer Bernard Plossu, who has given the book his blessing. “Water appeared quietly, shaping both the work and this book.”

Along the way, a companion appears: a dog, belonging to a friend of the photographer, opens the book and closes it, a white silhouette in the mist of Dartmoor, in Devon. Mathieu Chaze offers his own version of the Hound of the Baskervilles, set in the same granite moorlands where Conan Doyle placed his legend, but against all terror: the coat is pale, the bearing gentle, and the animal has less of the monster about it than of the guardian angel.

Beneath its paws, the stone holds water in natural basins that the children of the woods call “fairy pools”. In one waterhole, a dog’s head is reflected, like a mythological apparition. The stage is set, and nature is romantic through and through. Further on, trees with thick roots plunge into marshland, echoing the Deep South landscapes of Sally Mann.

The author acknowledges an affinity with the American photographer he admires, in “her relationship to childhood and nature”. On a lake, at the edge of a swimming pool or a river, the silhouettes of birds and children dissolve into his images, as if in a dream. The geographer Élisée Reclus lends his authority to this reverie in the book’s opening pages, with words borrowed from his Histoire d’un ruisseau (1869): “The story of a stream, even one that is born and lost in the moss, is the story of infinity.”

In these dark English waters, something of childhood remains, like a paradise lost. But the photography opens onto other territories. In Norway, Brekkefossen and Rjoandefossen frame powerful falls in the Nordfjord, while Apparition, Nordfjord and Ripples, Nordfjord capture, by contrast, the stillness of a fjord’s surface. Further still, the black water of Lake Ashi, in Japan, rests in the hollow of an ancient volcano.

From one continent to another: water, and the same silence. One image, taken along a canal, stands apart in this largely rural ensemble. Its geometric composition, the perfectly straight waterline, the solitary figure in the distance belong to the vocabulary of French humanist photography, like a brief urban detour in a book otherwise wholly devoted to nature.

Mathieu Chaze claims a simple method, close to the one Bernard Plossu advocates: walking, and prolonged immersion in the landscape. Over the years, he says, the images ceased to feel isolated; they began to answer one another, “like the intervals that give shape to a song”. The book’s title, Song of Silent Water, thus reveals the secret of its making.

The object itself is worth the journey. Its naked-spine binding exposes the stitching rather than concealing it, on a matt paper that refuses any hint of gloss, a design by Federico Barbon. The dialogue between images, however, is the work of David Campany who chose to set certain images in conversation, paired across full-bleed double spreads, giving rise to new narratives. The water may be still, but the photography is anything but.

Against the keepers of the temple who swear by the view camera alone, Mathieu Chaze happily works across the Leica range, between his Q2 for speed and his SL2 when the composition calls for more time, and even allows himself an image or two taken on a smartphone, caught on the wing, whose spontaneity unsettles the book’s contemplative tempo.

The Boy with the Finger is a fine example: a happy accident, taken as his son, facing the sea, raised his arm to point something out in the distance. His father loved “how the harsh sunlight falls on his body” and decided to include it in the book. Other portraits of his sons, now on the edge of adolescence, are scattered like gems throughout the book, as an ersatz of those lost moments of childhood, before the landscape takes over once more. The book, after all, is dedicated to them, and to his wife Amber.

The cycle, meanwhile, is already running its course. Mathieu Chaze is currently at work on the Alpilles, in the south of France, where his own parents live. Rock had already made its appearance in Song of Silent Water, discreet, surfacing beneath water and mist. The patience of water, no doubt, is also that of the photographer: who knows whether the mineral, in its turn, might not become the star of his next images.

Song of Silent Water by Mathieu Chaze is edited by David Campany, designed by Federico Barbon Studio, and published by L’Artiere (Bologna), 2026. First edition of 700 copies.