Untitled, from the series “Au bord du Volcan” (2025). © Ilanit Illouz.

Last year, during Paris Photo, Ilanit Illouz’s work arrested me. In the flow of visitors and images, her work stood still. It drew me in. Large salt prints displayed a materiality I had never seen before at this scale.

Without knowing much about her work, I assumed it was the result of long walks in remote landscapes. As anthropologist Tim Ingold observed in his brief history of lines, the wanderer orients themselves based on how light describes surfaces and textures, but also the pressure of touch felt through their feet. I could see all of these traits in Ilanit’s work.

Her photography restores a terrestrial form lost through aesthetics and new technologies. Reacting to changing atmospheric conditions over time, her fossilized salt prints weep. As 1-0f-1’s, her prints remind us how precious, fragile, but also cosmic life on Earth is.

What follows is a brief exchange I had with Ilanit, who kindly answered my questions in writing earlier this month.

I first discovered your work at Paris Photo in 2025 and was struck by your series of tirages fossilisés au sel (salt-fossilised prints), which I believe you made in the Judean Desert. They have an arresting, place-specific quality. Tell us how you developed this technique over time.

My work sits at the intersection of photography, sculpture and printmaking. I am interested in landscape, but also in how an image can directly engage with its subject.

For several years, I have been developing an approach to photography as a living material. I aim to explore its materiality.

Ilanit Illouz, Onde noire III, from the series “Les Dolines” (2016-2026). © Ilanit Illouz.

The ‘Dolines’ series began in 2016, following a residency in the Judean Desert, between Israel, Palestine and the Dead Sea. This journey continued research I had previously done around a former transit camp in Marseille, where I developed a method based on walking, observation, and collecting materials.

The project you saw at Paris Photo last year focuses on the gradual disappearance of the Dead Sea, a large salt lake, largely due to mineral extraction and the reduced flow of the River Jordan. The landscape thus bears the traces of its own disappearance. In this region, salt gradually came to dominate my attention. Initially, I didn’t plan to work with salt. However, it was everywhere, from rocks and vegetation to the ground and the Dead Sea shore. What interested me was how salt preserves as much as it corrodes. It is essential to life and photography.

Dolines by Ilanit Illouz, installation view, Fata Morgana, Jeu de Paume, Paris, France, 22 March to 22 May 2022. Image courtesy: Jeu de Paume.

When I returned to my studio, I wanted to recapture something of what I had felt travelling through the Dead Sea region. I sought a way to translate those sensations, to create my own language, all the while staying connected to the power of those landscapes and the stories they carry. I tried quite a few experiments until I began immersing my prints in baths. Water, and above all its disappearance, was already at the heart of the project.

Crystallisation depends on many factors: salt concentration, evaporation, humidity, temperature and the seasons. Over time, I’ve learnt to work with these phenomena rather than trying to control them. Each print develops over several weeks, and sometimes several months. Some go through a phase where the salt absorbs moisture from the air and forms small droplets on the paper surface, as though the images were weeping. I call them ‘the weepers’ or ‘the witches’.

I guess what interests me most is that the salt isn’t just a substance deposited on the image. It is part and parcel of its emergence. It becomes a sort of photographic developer. Photography ceases to be merely a surface and becomes a rugged object, almost a fragment of a landscape.

Layers upon layers of geologic time form your work. The Earth itself becomes your primary material and subject, and your prints are 1-of-1s. At the same time, their material strength reminds me how transient and fragile life is. This matter was there long before and will outlive us all. Is it a tension that informs what you do? 

Yes, deeply. I believe this tension runs through all my work. It’s a sort of tipping point. My projects are built over the long term. There is the time I spend researching, travelling, taking photographs and gathering material, and then there is the time spent experimenting in the studio. This back-and-forth between the outdoors and indoors allows me to build up my own textual and visual resources. Over time, it becomes an atlas of images and materials.

Efflorescence blanche, from the series “Les Dolines” (2016-2026). © Ilanit Illouz.

When I walk a landscape, I am struck by the coexistence of very different timescales. There is the time of the body, the time of walking, and the geological time of rock formation, erosion or sedimentation. Landscapes carry memories that extend far beyond our own existence. Over time, salt has become a central element of my research. It is a link between human and non-human narratives. It is found in the earth, in plants, in our bodies, but also in rituals and traditions. It runs through different forms of life and different histories. In my photographs, this tension becomes physical. The crystals seem to fossilise the image, giving it a depth, an almost geological duration. The paper warps, the crystals may come loose, and the whole remains sensitive to its environment. I love the idea that an image can convey both something very ancient and something that is still forming. This fragility is not necessarily melancholic. It also calls for attention and care.

When I look at your work, I feel a slowness that I can’t help but connect to walking, which seems central to your artistic process. Tell us what walking is to you.

Walking is an integral part of my process, usually in the form of aimless wanderings. I often set off without a specific route, letting the landscape guide my steps. It is, above all, a way of looking. Observation is central in my work, just as much as the act of taking the photograph itself. I focus on details: variations in the ground, a patch of light, a mark, a texture that might seem insignificant. As I wander, I gather fragments of the landscape: sand, salt, dust, stones, plants. These elements then become materials for my images. They are not merely mementoes of the place, but a way of extending its existence into the studio. A sort of implicit narrative. I also sometimes turn certain plants into ash to obtain pigments which I then incorporate into the prints. Memory also plays an important role. When selecting images, as I look back at my photographs, I try to recall not only what I saw, but also what I felt. There is something of the latent image in this: it remains a memory and only reveals itself later. For me, there is a continuity between the time spent outdoors and that spent in the studio. Walking, looking, collecting, photographing, remembering, immersing oneself, waiting, returning: these are actions that form the same process.

France went through a sweltering summer with destructive wildfires. How have those affected you? 

Wildfires and heatwaves have left a deep impression on me, both because of their impact on the most vulnerable communities and on the landscapes and wildlife. I am reminded of Vinciane Despret’s reflections: when a species disappears, the relationships and ways of inhabiting the world associated with it also fade away. It is the disappearance of an entire world.

Transformations have been a recurring theme in my work for several years. I am interested in the traces they leave behind in the landscape, in what disappears, but also in what endures or re-emerges. I do not seek to depict the catastrophe in a spectacular manner, but rather to capture its traces as a sensory archive of a world in flux.

We live in the Anthropocene, an era marked by humanity’s geophysical footprint on a planetary scale. Do you reflect on photography’s rapacious intertwining with the Earth in your work?

This is an important question, and it also highlights contradictions in my own practice. We tend to think of photography as an image, sometimes forgetting its materiality. Yet it depends on resources, minerals, water and chemicals. Its history began in Judean bitumen and later expanded into silver salts and copper plates. For several years now, I have been interested in areas marked by resource extraction. With *Dolines*, on the shores of the Dead Sea, I explore a landscape that is drying up and collapsing. In *Petra*, I work with copper, a material extracted from the earth, which also raises questions about the violence of extraction. And in *Au bord du volcan*, on Mount Etna, I focus on the geological memory of rocks and ash.

Cavité III, from the series “Au bord du volcan” (2026). © Ilanit Illouz.

In my work, the landscape is not merely a subject to be photographed. The materials that make it up create the images. Salt, dust and pigments interact with the prints, transforming them and sometimes making them more fragile. There is a dialogue between my actions and those of the material. I never fully control what happens. Photography becomes a living archive, which preserves as much as it deteriorates. For me, this ties in with the idea of the apocalypse, in its original sense of revelation: making often invisible transformations visible. This way of working does not elude the ecological contradictions of photography, but it pushes me to be more mindful of the materials I use and of our relationship with living things.

What does photographing in a warming world mean to you?

It’s funny, when I read your question, I immediately thought of Chris Marker’s film, Le Fond de l’air est rouge. It’s a film from 1977, but I find it deeply relevant today. It looks back at the revolutionary struggles and hopes of the 1960s and 1970s, but also at the disillusionment that followed. When you look at what’s happening today – the wars, the rise of authoritarianism, the social and climate crises – you realise that many of the issues remain the same. I believe that everything is deeply interconnected. We cannot separate climate issues from human, social and political concerns. Even though my approach is above all sensitive and poetic, my work is inevitably informed by these concerns.