Samuel Feron

samuel FERON Head Shot BW

Samuel Féron has been photographing Nature for 20 years, with a predilection for the most remote corners where the place of man is precarious at best, if not impossible: volcanoes of Hawaii, Chile or Kamchatka, immense deserts of the Atacama, frozen deserts of Iceland or burning deserts of the Atacama, forests of Costa Rica, Indonesia, Colombia…
Samuel’s photographic exploration is not limited to the discovery of places and natural beauties. In a time when access to places has become easier for everyone, Samuel felt the need to make a break. This is how he first offers an artistic exploration where the elements are sublimated, where the photographer’s eye builds new perspectives and imagines new paths. Leaving aside the déjà vu, he makes us discover the invisible.
Samuel thus stimulates our senses, provokes our astonishment, mobilizing imagination, creativity, technique and rupture. In his photographs, scales mix, colors challenge us, the abstract replaces reality, in order the World has once again become the place of mystery and fascination.

samuel FERON Sample 1

A scene of the series ‘Jungle’, Colombia 2022.

For Samuel, photography has trivialized iconic places and is now the scene of a frenzied race of friends and likes. The days of photographer Ansel Adams are no more. Delivered to mass tourism, the world had to abandon its secrets; relentlessly mapped by satellites, it has lost its invisibility. Our gaze extends without obstacle beyond transparent borders. We no longer imagine: we look. The exploration of the world has come to an end. We got lost as children. Since the invisible has disappeared, we must reinvent it, if we want to rediscover the original emotion, the new astonishment.

“The sin of the modern world is the refusal of the invisible,” according to Julien Green. More than ever, introspection and personal research are essential. The intimate must supplant testimony and representation give way to suggestion. From a raw reality, it is therefore a question of shaping an intimate reality. So, Samuel took the camera, and, like a powerful exploring torch, began to scan reality, not to reveal it, but to shape it, like a goldsmith who, in front of a rough diamond, decides to work on it to make a jewel.

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Aerial view over dried mosses and cotton flowers. Iceland 2020.

“I don’t believe in an intangible reality. I like the fact that an image retains a certain virtuality. The shutter release isn’t what creates the image; it just makes nothingness virtual. The existence the image acquires once the button is pressed is mere contingency and ephemerality, linked only to the instant of the shot. The photographer’s emotional state cannot be conveyed to the person who views the image in another place, another time. Therefore, I prefer to think of the image as virtual, in the quantum sense: simultaneously holding a multitude of forms. Time is placed on hold—the work of the photographer resumes much later. And when time has passed and I open the virtual image, I endeavor to impart a reality to it, as if it doesn’t yet have an emotional or aesthetic identity.
Sometimes I find myself returning to the same photograph. Not to improve it, because I don’t believe that art and aesthetics, perfecting and perfection follow asymptotic logic. I believe them to be shifting, relative, and contingent. My aim is to create a new image, as seen from my current perspective on a moment in the past. Seeing the invisible with an exploratory and evolving gaze.”
Samuel

Work History, Books, Films and Exhibitions

Some international awards:
• ND Awards: Silver/2023, Photographer of the Year 2019
• FAPA (Gold/2021)
• MIFA (Gold/2018, Silver/2020)
• Epson Pano Awards (Gold/2018)
• Monochrome Awards (Gold/2017)
Exhibitions:
• France – Paris: Carrousel du Louvre, Mondapart
• USA – Minnesota, Tucson

Samuel is a juror of Px3 (Paris), of the New York Photography Awards. He founded the site of excellence, Terra Quantum (2015), dedicated to nature and wildlife photography, bringing together 300 photographers selected by an international jury.

In 2024, gathering some 200 photographs over 20 years, he made a film depicting the disappearance of Nothingness, the appearance of Matter and its confrontation with Man and Time.