Published by La Martinière in 2012, Pierre de Vallombreuse’s Hommes racines grew out of an exhibition presented at Les Champs Libres in Rennes from 26 April to 23 September that year. The 224-page French-language hardcover gives book form to a project concerned with a precise and urgent relation: the intimate bond between human communities and the environments they inhabit.

Vallombreuse’s field of inquiry spans ten peoples described as firmly rooted in their territories, alongside communities that have been uprooted and are attempting to recover part of their identity. This contrast prevents “roots” from settling into a merely poetic metaphor. Here, rootedness involves land, inherited knowledge, cultural continuity, and exposure to forces that can sever those connections.

The photographs address a natural world undergoing profound contemporary transformation. Deforestation, global warming, and pollution form the project’s ecological horizon, but the book does not isolate environmental change from human consequence. Indigenous peoples appear as especially vulnerable to these disruptions and often among the first to confront them; they are also presented as custodians of knowledge important to preserving biodiversity. The work consequently places questions of identity and ecology within the same frame, asking what a sustainable humanity might require.

For a serious photobook collection, Hommes racines merits attention less as a decorative survey than as a concentrated document in which photography, environmental thought, and exhibition history meet. Its comparative premise—territorial belonging set against uprooting—offers a clear intellectual structure for viewing the work, while its origin in a public cultural exhibition anchors the volume in a specific French institutional moment. The scale of the 224-page publication allows this argument to be encountered as a body of work rather than through a single emblematic image.