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Overshoot #1, Marine Lanier by Yogan MullerMarch 30, 2025

Overshoot is Yogan Muller’s new column at the intersection of contemporary photography, the Anthropocene, stark inequalities, and exponential technology.

Overshoot refers to ecological overshoot, a notion that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s when it became clear that perpetual growth, as conceived and sought by Western countries, was incompatible with life on Earth in the long term.

Photography has been a new pair of eyes to situate ourselves within a changing environment. Artists have produced compelling projects on the social and ecological implications of the extraordinary changes of the past 150 years. Meanwhile, the camera has concretely served–and catalyzed–colonization, development, and extractivism, as the recent material turn in art history shows.

In other words, while photography has been a powerful pair of eyes to see the world anew, it’s also been a sophisticated tool to watch it apace, coupling our visual culture with the power of the global thermo-industrial machinery, thus getting us visibly closer to our devastating ecological footprint.

Every month, Overshoot features photographers, curators, and educators whose work engages with the ecological crisis, transcends limits through aesthetic experiments, and addresses environmental injustice.

At a critical juncture where exponential technology amplifies a perfect storm of crises, what does photographing in a warming and depleting world mean? What is the significance of adding images in a world already awash in images? How can photographs evolve into harbingers of change?

Overshoot expands within this resolutely ecological approach to image-making, highlighting visual imaginaries that project us into a more equitable and sustainable world.

Overshoot, Yogan Muller, Marine Lanier, Le Jardin d'Hannibal

It’s an honor to feature French photographer Marine Lanier in this inaugural column.

Marine Lanier was born in 1981 in Valence, France. Her work is rooted in magical realism and explores liminal spaces and margins inhabited by mysterious phenomena and individuals. Superstitions, sensorial perceptions, and dreams infuse her works. Marine is a 2024-2025 Casa de Vélazquez artist. Her work is represented by Espace Jörg Brockmann and has been exhibited internationally.

Yogan Muller: I want to start by asking you how Le Jardin d’Hannibal (i.e., Hannibal’s Garden) came about. How did you find out about this highly-perched research garden in the French Alps and start photographing there? Can you briefly describe the “flying alpine pasture” experiments you photographed?

Marine Lanier: Le Jardin d’Hannibal (Hannibal’s Garden) project stems from a happy accident. In April 2019, I became an artist-in-residence at the Jardin du Lautaret, a research botanical garden in the French Alps through photographer Sophie Ristelhueber. Sophie couldn’t attend so she mentioned my name, knowing I come from a family of gardeners and horticulturists. There I was, in one of the oldest botanical alpine gardens in Europe.

Unbeknownst to me, what began as a brief artist residency became a three-year project that received support from Bibliothèque Nationale de France and their Radioscopie de la France, a nationwide photographic survey in 2022.

During the 15-day residency, artists also get to meet and collaborate with a writer. That year, Dan O’Brien, an American author known for his nature writing was the invited writer.

In April at 6,500 feet, snow still covers the landscape. Unable to take pictures, I carefully studied the garden’s situation and connected with two scientists who offered me to stay again in the late spring and summer seasons. Founded in the 19th century, the Lautaret is a vibrant research and conservation center with an incredibly unique collection of alpine flora from all five continents.

One of the experiments consists of transplanting alpine flora to a lower biotic zone, thus exposing plants to the projected temperature rise caused by global warming in the year 2100.

I started taking pictures of the garden and that large-scale transplanting experiment, so the project is grounded in science but I quickly found myself immersed in and fascinated by Hannibal’s stories. Facts and tales mingled.

YM: How did you unite forces within this project?

ML: The artist residency was a time and place of genuine collaboration. Dan brought his knowledge and appreciation of the prairie ecosystems, which overlapped with the poetic tropes I employed as I photographed the Lautaret garden and vast alpine landscape. Our residency fostered a rich dialogue between our practices, words, and images, intersecting many themes like the human/nature relationship, memory, and conservation. His stories transported me to the American West.

One night, Dan told the story of Hannibal (ca. 200 BC) who crossed the Alps with elephants to invade Italy. His words were full of metaphors and pictures that transcended the place. They planted a seed. A web of connective threads ran through the work I had done thus far, and a narrative started to form. I found myself associating what I was photographing in the Lautaret garden with the story of Hannibal, childhood stories, and my bloodlines. My grandmother was Italian, my grandfather was a nurseryman, and my father worked in a nursery, too. This formed the backbone of my developing series and infused the work with a sense of place and vibrant, almost ardant, dynamic.

YM: In this series, crisp documentarian images coexist with abstract close-ups, landscapes, and color shifts to paint a complex picture of the many reverberations of human-induced climate change on non-human species. For me, you photographed the cascading effects of this global and yet slow-burning phenomenon. It becomes tangible, especially once the pictures are sequenced and enshrined in a book of concise and tactile quality like yours. Can you talk about your photographic process a bit? Was it clear from the get-go you wanted to make a book?

ML: Most of my projects are conceived as books. However, it usually takes years for the work to “ripen” and materialize in a book. Having a show during the 2024 Rencontres d’Arles catalyzed the production and release of Hannibal’s Garden. With Poursuite Editions, we wanted to design and print a first chapter that was radical in terms of sequencing and the absence of context to invite readers to enter into a dystopic narrative. We laid out all my pictures on the floor and edited and sequenced them, focusing on colors, meaning, form, rhythm, seasons, portraits, tools, and mountains.

There’s indeed a tactile dimension, but also room for errors, ruptures, and other bifurcations that let living organisms occupy the frame: an epiphany illuminating people’s faces, or sap rushing through leaves.

©Marine Lanier, Spread from Le Jardin d’Hannibal

I channeled some of the instincts and representations we collectively harbor as we confront climate change. In the book, the viewer moves through pre or post-apocalyptic views, disrupting their sense of time. One of the references that came to my mind was a scene in Hitckcock’s Vertigo where Madeleine and Scottie visit Sequoia National Park and find themselves in awe in front of age-old tree rings. Sequoias exude eternity and nature’s immutable laws. That scene compellingly captures the dichotomy between thousand-year-old trees and the brevity of human life, but also symbolizes how time, memory, and identity are intertwined in this film. Similarly, my book is sequenced in a way that suggests how the past persists and punctures the present.

©Marine Lanier, Le Jardin d’Hannibal, published by Poursuite Editions, 2024.

YM: Your book, published by Poursuite Editions, was released at the time of your exhibition at Les Rencontres d’Arles in July 2024. Please describe the installation at the venue called “Le Jardin d’Été” in Arles.

Note: our readers can watch a brief interview/presentation here (Arles 2024): https://www.rencontres-arles.com/en/expositions/view/1538/marine-lanier

ML: The Rencontres d’Arles team offered me to show the series in a garden called ‘Le Jardin d’Été’ near the Roman amphitheater. I long pondered how I could show my images in this intrinsically iconic place. I chose close-ups, colors, portraits, and fragments to create sharp distinctions and hiatuses with the Le Jardin d’Été. Above all, I chose pictures that’d make my series stand as an organic, vibrant entity. I mocked up multiple configurations to achieve that goal. However, what I did not anticipate was how the tree leaves, wind, and light caressed my portraits and made the characters I photographed look like they had retreated into a meditative state. That truly was a metaphysical experience.

YM: Who are the characters whose portraits are interspersed in the book?

ML: They are scientists, gardeners, and botanists working in the Lautaret Garden, whether as part of the research station team or hailing from the nearby University of Grenoble and doing fieldwork. In my pictures, they embody the specific qualities I associate with cyclical time. To me, that time suspension is central. I drew inspiration from classical painters like Fra Angelico and found deep inspiration in hooded characters, madonnas, warriors, hermits, etc.

I wanted my characters to show up similarly, on the brink of an intense fever, a long retreat, but also deep melancholia and acceptance. I wanted them to look detached.

French filmmaker Robert Bresson had a profound influence on how I make portraits. For him, a face is a space of abstraction where feelings can be reduced and expressed in their most primal forms. There’s truly a metaphysical dimension in Bresson’s approach to faces and human representation. To me, he avoids excess theatricality and expression and instead focuses on the human soul depths while keeping enough distance to inquire about the human condition.

Similarly, in my book, portraits are akin to a surface where questions and tensions about the human condition and existence become manifest. They create space for contemplation and the invisible without giving immediate answers.

In addition, the more scientific-looking photographs I made through a microscope connect all the living beings that inhabit my book: all lifeforms, human and non-human, coexist, albeit ephemerally, in the vast expanse of geological time. © Marine Lanier, Les Jardiniers #1, from Le Jardin d’Hannibal, 2024

YM: In a world on track to breach the 1.5°C warming threshold, I am curious to hear what you saw, felt, and experienced in Le Jardin du Lautaret, at the forefront of climate change research.

ML: Between 2019 and 2024, the nearby glacier was melting at an alarming rate. I could see the changes taking place. During my last field trip, plants blossomed a month and a half before the usual blooming season. When I followed scientists as they transplanted plants to downhill biotic zones, we witnessed microscopic but sweeping changes in the soil: plant life thrived at the microscopic level. Scientists did not expect that, which reminded me how, we, photographers, often anticipate making specific pictures and instead end up discovering a whole host of other things in the viewfinder. Silence, retreat, and patience are necessary. © Marine Lanier, Reliefs #2, from Le Jardin d’Hannibal, 2024

YM: What does photographing in a warming world mean to you?

ML: Photographing in a warming world raises some interesting tensions between art making and its ecological footprint. I believe working with a view camera does promote slowness, intent, and sobriety. But in the end, everything we do has a footprint. My work blends a documentarian approach with a resolutely fictional twist. It gestures at other places and perhaps other worlds while contending with the practical and political issues we must contend with today.

When it comes to climate change, I believe it’s necessary to take a few steps back because we can’t fully comprehend what’s unfolding just yet. Will an ecological collapse precede a renewal, a renaissance of sorts? Only time will tell, I am afraid. Collapse affected a lot of ancient civilizations. Time and again, avid resource extraction and use precipitated crises and declines. That should function as a cautionary tale. I hope making photographs that are charged with all of this opens new ways to relate to the world and each other.

Yogan Muller is a French-Algerian photographer, first-generation graduate, and educator. His work engages with the ecological crisis and its impact on landscapes and communities. Yogan works with photography, photogrammetry, drones, artificial intelligence, and the book form. Research, critical approaches to landscape, fieldwork, and design are central to his artistic process.

Instagram: @YoganMuller

Tags: Marine Lanier, Overshoot, Yogan Muller