Published by Verlhac Editions in 2008, Cédric Delsaux’s Here to Stay—also presented under the French title Nous resterons sur Terre—examines a planet marked by both the promises and the costs of modern progress. Its scope is deliberately expansive: natural beauty and environmental damage, human ambition and depleted resources, civilization and the living world are treated not as separate subjects but as parts of the same unsettled condition.
Delsaux photographs largely deserted, improbable places that give Western civilization an estranged, at times science-fictional appearance. His approach is less a neutral survey than a poetic and disquieting photographic essay. Familiar environments begin to resemble evidence from a society that has exceeded its own assumptions about growth and control. This tension separates the work from straightforward environmental documentation: the photographs neither idealize landscape nor merely catalogue destruction, but hold attraction, menace and contradiction within a single field of inquiry.
The photographic sequence is punctuated by interviews with environmental thinker James Lovelock, Wangari Maathai, Edgar Morin and Mikhail Gorbachev. Their voices extend the book beyond observation toward questions of responsibility, ecological urgency and the possibility of changing course. The publication also forms part of a broader project encompassing film and photographic essay, placing Delsaux’s images within a consciously interdisciplinary argument rather than presenting them as an autonomous landscape series.
At 224 pages, in French and English, and measuring approximately 37.5 by 29 centimetres, the volume gives this argument substantial visual and textual space. Its relevance to a serious collection rests on that conjunction: an environmental subject approached through unsettling constructed vision, set beside public intellectual discourse and sustained at book length. For collections focused on environmental photography, contemporary civilization or the photobook as a forum for ideas, Here to Stay records a notably ambitious meeting of image, text and ecological thought.
