4 December 2025

11:45 AM – 12:30 AM

Salle Proudhon

Sarah Ritter

Sarah Ritter first studied philosophy with Jean-Luc Nancy before enrolling at the École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie in Arles. Her work, which features in several public and private collections, is regularly exhibited in France and abroad. She is a 2021 graduate of the Hauts-de-France Institute for Photography program. This research gave rise to the series Soleils fantômes (Ghost Suns) and Ciels d’industrie (Industrial Skies), produced with the support of the BnF as part of the Radioscopie de la France (Radioscopy of France) commission (2022), and the Fondation des Artistes (2023). In the same year, she won the Schneider Foundation Prize for Les vagues scélérates (Rogue Waves). In 2019, she published her monograph La nuit craque sous nos doigts (Éditions Loco), then co-edited Wild Rumors, Moby-Dick, Detroit et autres récits in 2023, the result of collective research on Melville’s novel. Her heuristic and experimental approach combines various processes (screen printing, heliogravure, projection, etc.) to question the materiality and fiction specific to photography.

Human time, geological time: what are the similarities?

By combining photographs from national archives of the working world, shots taken in mines in France and Tierra del Fuego, and studio superimpositions, Sarah Ritter’s project explores the telluric link between humans and matter, between the gestures of extraction and those of representation. These images, both documentary and reinvented, question spaces where the ground becomes memory and projection. Through layers of archives, industrial landscapes, and the play of light and shadow in the studio, the work offers an ambiguous and fragmented reading of the underground world. Both archaic and contemporary, the shapes, textures, and lights compose a visual experience that invites the viewer to lose themselves in the depths—to encounter that which both sustains and eludes us.