"The text that follows, written in 2010, is devoted to L'Europe du silence, a major book by Stéphane Duroy. It deals with the relations between the photographic image and history, with exile, with the photographic time imagined by Stéphane Duroy. It explores a question too often ignored: the sequencing of images in a book, the way of constructing a photographic essay. It brings to light the fragility of our knowledge and shows how much uncertainty is decisive in photographic creation. This text also tries to understand why the most interesting part of the photographic image is the hallucinatory dazzle it conveys, the perception of what is in the process of fading and at the same time of what is in a state of emergence, of the dawn and the twilight of time and history." E.N.