Atlas des Régions Naturelles: Documenting and Categorizing the French Landscape

With the sixth edition of the Atlas des Régions Naturelles (ARN), we continue our long-term documentation of the 450 natural regions—or pays (lands)—composing France. Started in 2017, we traverse these small geographical and cultural entities, collecting visual elements that embody the essence of a region. This series comingles human-made particularities—traditional architecture, toponyms, local tastes, historical traces—and natural features, such as landscapes, colors, and vegetation.

In this feature, we share a small selection of photographs from the latest volume of the Atlas des Régions Naturelles, published this month. The book contains about 600 photos divided into sixteen chapters: twelve geographical chapters that describe a specific territory and four that show architectural typologies. As seen below, most of the photographs in the ARN show constructions of all kinds—old, recent, functional, religious, inhabited, or in ruins—taken in a descriptive way. The primary intention of the atlas is to show the richness of the forms constituting a built environment, and each construction is photographed with the same care regardless of its function or prestige.

Landscape photos complete the set to illustrate the diversity of the regions and the impact that the environment has on the activities and therefore on the architecture.

In the same way that we photograph all types of constructions without making a hierarchy, we take the same number of photos in each region so that all are equal. In this way we document large parts of French territory that are very rarely photographed and, thereby, attempt to minimize the impact of the tourist image on the representation of a country.

The ambition of our project is to describe France, where we live, in a much more complete and representative way than the usual clichés that everyone knows. But, perhaps more importantly, our project is to develop a descriptive method that could be applied to Japan, Spain, or the USA, a sort of common protocol that could eventually constitute a global photographic base. The originality of our method consists in crossing two systems of representation, one geographical—we document places—and the other typological—we classify constructions by genre, period, and function—both of which can be consulted separately or in a combined way as you can see on the website that constitutes the matrix of the ARN.

The site currently contains approximately 20,000 photos and should present double that number when the project is finished. The ARN series will ultimately comprise thirty volumes, or about 10,000 pages and 15,000 photos. We publish two volumes per year and expect to complete this work in about ten years.

PUBLICATION DETAILS

Atlas des Régions Naturelles Vol.6
Eric Tabuchi & Nelly Monnier
384 pages, 17 x 32 cm I book + map

Silkcreen on softcover
Copublished by Poursuite & GwinZegal
Published October 2024