Bernard Descamps's new book, titled natura in homage to the first naturalist essays of antiquity, is the fruit of patient work and of a long quest for images of nature. Not spectacular images from the ends of the earth but simply touching ones, of the nature so close to us that we so often neglect: the formal beauty of the horizon line between sea and sky or of a snow-covered mountain, a triangle of black and white; the vertical elegance of a centuries-old tree or of a flight of common cranes in the Lorraine sky. Four chapters of black-and-white photographs, images made of rocks, rough or smooth bark, water, clouds, light and wind: an approach to the void and the full, to balances and silence. Poetry to save us.