Un point bleu pâle

For as long as I can remember, I've always seen my father watching the clouds. When he was away, I was assigned to read the rain gauge every morning, scrupulously recording the rainfall and temperatures.

 His passion for meteorology began in the winter of 1963, described as historically cold. His first records were disjointed, alternating between noting temperatures, describing the sky and, occasionally, recording rainfall. Fascinated by the winters of his childhood, he observed and archived only those winters. The other seasons had little flavour, being less subject to such intense variations as the winters of yesteryear.  Ask my father, and he'll tell you how, little by little, we've moved on. How the excitement of morning frosts gave way to the anxiety of troubled cycles and the interminable wait for downpours.  As the seasons passed, the field records sent by post to Météo France ran out. All that's left are the automatic stations in the towns, which broadcast without anyone coming to check them. All eyes are glued to the screen while the clouds continue to roll across the sky. No scientist will capture the freshness of a morning flowing into the hollow of a river, or the shiver of daffodils in the woods, or the caress of the sun on the wheat ear. The murmur of the trivial has become inaudible and the clouds evaporate in silence. The drying earth, too, makes no sound. Like my father's rain gauge. Endlessly empty. Like his eyes, fading into the reflection of the weather models. Too red to let the blue of his eyes show through. Turned pink, violet, exploring that unseen spectrum. The colour of beetroot on his stained, oxidized hands, which no rain will ever wash off again.  Un point bleu pâle is an unconcealed reference to Pale Blue Dot, a photograph of planet Earth taken on 14 February 1990 by the Voyager 1 probe from a distance of over six billion kilometers. To this day, it remains the most distant photograph of the Earth. In this project, the stories intertwine. Like a need to interweave my family history, intimately linked to meteorological observation, with the history of human relationships with the Earth and changes in its climate. How these two previously unrelated stories now tell the tale of a global awakening to the urgent need to reconsider our place on Earth and in the universe.In this way, the project crosses back and forth between photographs and archives collected by my father over the course of his life (weather records, newspaper cuttings, etc.), like a poetic ode to the observation and slowness of clouds. Un point bleu pâle questions and confronts climate issues through a sensitive perspective.

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