Pauline Planchon
Pauline Planchon is a French photographer based in Paris. She is self-taught and known for her contemplative approach to remote landscapes. Her recent series, No Man’s Light, emerged from solo expeditions through Lapland and Svalbard, where she focused on the transformative role of light in extreme environments.
Originally trained as a veterinarian and deeply familiar with nature through hunting culture, she later shifted to visual storytelling, using photography to evoke stillness, emotion, and ecological fragility.
Pauline’s early photographic work was inspired by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century still-life painting, particularly scenes linked to traditional hunting culture. She gained early recognition at the Animal Art Paris Salon in 2016, where she was awarded the Prix de la Révélation. As her practice evolved, she shifted her focus toward capturing isolated northern environments, using light as her primary subject and narrative force.
During expeditions in Lapland and Svalbard, she encountered silence, absence, and elemental motion. Guided by weather and solitude, she embraced a new way of seeing. Her images began to reflect not just what she observed but what she felt. No Man’s Light was shaped by this shift: a quiet, immersive response to the invisible forces shaping remote landscapes.
No Man’s Light is both a visual study and an emotional experience. In forests and coastal zones, volcanic terrain and snowbound expanses, Pauline photographs not to document but to evoke. Light breaks through the fog, dissolving edges and rendering solid forms fluid. These images dwell in moments of transformation: weather reshaping space, silence sculpting mood.
Her work invites viewers to pause and reflect on the beauty and vulnerability of lands untouched by human presence. Through composition, patience, and restraint, she presents nature as sovereign yet threatened. With each image, she reminds us of our smallness and the urgent need to protect what remains wild.
No Man’s Light is Pauline Planchon’s current exhibition series, developed through journeys across Lapland and Svalbard. Her early work received the Prix de la Révélation at the Animal Art Paris Salon in 2016.
