Chambre noire, archive blanche returns to Eugène Trutat’s photographs of the Pyrenees through the collection of the Muséum de Toulouse. Trutat was a naturalist, museum curator and early photographer whose studies included the retreat of glaciers. His late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century images now hold another significance: they preserve landscapes that have changed, while the glass plates themselves remain vulnerable to deterioration. The book brings these two forms of disappearance into relation.

Lia Pradal developed the publication from approximately a hundred images selected from the museum’s roughly fourteen thousand Trutat plates. Cropping, juxtaposition and variations in opacity create a contemporary reading of the archive. The sequence follows an ascent toward the summits, where the imagery becomes increasingly luminous and seems to dissolve. Extracts from Trutat’s notebooks, publications and observations form a second thread, connecting the visual journey with the language of mountain exploration and study.

Published by Éditions Païen in 2025, the French-language standard edition contains 88 pages at 28.5 × 20 cm, with a print run of 300. Lisa Cocrelle contributes text, and Studio Trames in Sète printed the book in black, grey and blue risograph inks. The grain and layered tones recall the photographic surfaces from which the images were taken. Here, the material qualities of reproduction participate in the subject: a fragile archive is given a new printed form while retaining an impression of instability.

For collectors, the book is valuable as a specific encounter between historical photography and contemporary editing. It demonstrates how selection and printing can redirect attention within an existing collection, drawing environmental questions from images originally made for other purposes. The publication received a special mention in the historical category of the 2026 Rencontres d’Arles book awards. Its strongest point of interest remains the connection it establishes between the changing mountain and the changing photographic trace.