In a world saturated with ephemeral images, Something Vibrantly Alive advocates for slowing down. This visual and theoretical essay does not compile a nostalgic inventory, rather it opens up a critical space: What do we do with the images we produce? What do they reveal about our connection to the world, to memory, to life – and to what will survive us? Drawing on the work of more than 25 artists, at the crossroads of archives, anthropology, contemporary art and geology, Jean-Christophe Arcos explores a ‘visionary mineralogy’: a photography thought to be like stone – a persistent trace, a receptacle of time, resistant to erasure.