For Jean-Jacques Rousseau, writing is born from walking, among rocks and woods, mountains and lakes. Throughout the Confessions and the Reveries, the question of the gaze is omnipresent. Inner gaze, turned towards oneself, and outer gaze which meet like a – dream material – the landscape.

Traveling through Rousseauist country with his photographic camera, Daniel Challe endeavored throughout his walks to draw a secret skein weaving an emotional geographical constellation: that which connects the landscapes of the Val de Travers in Switzerland to the undergrowth of Ermenonville in the Oise, the mountain ranges of Chartreuse and Valais to the valleys of Maubec, the shimmering of the shores of the Alpine lakes to the garden of Charmettes.

In the essay that accompanies the photographs, Jean-Pierre Ferrini meditates on Rousseau’s view of nature: “One of Rousseau’s characteristic traits is that he subjectivizes the landscape, that he is the landscape that he sees, disappears into it. The landscape we see, we see it from Jean-Jacques' point of view. We experience a disappearance or dissolution of man in nature, annihilating himself before God in a grateful prayer to be able to enjoy all this beauty. The lake, the lakes (Leman, Annecy, Major, Bienne…) as a metaphor, dark room of the mirror of the soul. »

This book questions Rousseau's founding view of landscape by approaching it from these two sides: aesthetic through reminiscences of French painting, ethical in its very contemporary questioning of our relationship to nature and the crucial question of our 21st century: that of ecology.