Vertigo, the latest work by Swiss photographer Yann Mingard, offers us a reading that is both subjective and documented of the ecological drift of the world. Here we are, head on, into the Anthropocene era. Scientists justify this change of period by the cumulative capacity of men – ours – to overwhelm the power of telluric forces. The definition of this new era is based on objective physical measurements, but it could also be characterized by the dizzying level of impunity and inertia of men in the face of the coming disaster — seeming to border on denial of reality. Until the middle of the 20th century, artists were fascinated, almost blissfully, by wild and immaculate nature. Even if ethical or political questions underlie Yann Mingard's work, the subjugation, beauty and majesty of physical forces are not absent from his images. The flat areas of material, the colors, whisper to us the rumble of this earth in motion. Roland Barthes estimated the appeal of landscape photography through its ability to make the viewer want to project themselves into it, to inhabit it – this was without counting the rugged, irradiated, dystopian landscapes. What happened to the Alpine panoramas so popular with early photographers and Asian tourists? Yann Mingard takes us to the other side of the postcard, towards the abyss, into the bowels of rock collapses, uprooted trees and torrential lava. His landscapes at the limit of abstraction are devoid of a horizon capable of calming us, they show us in a disturbing prophecy sometimes the sky, sometimes geological matter (earth, rock, mud), but rarely the two together - as if, disgusted with each other, they henceforth refused to touch each other. The earth is shown torn apart, gaping, crisscrossed with the scars of a battle from which the main protagonists are absent. Invisible like fine particles suspended in the air or radioactive radiation, the human figure only appears in the form of strange puppets in search of a nuclear warhead lost in the permafrost. In 1678, well before the first industrial revolution, calling on God as a last resort, the inhabitants of the small village of Fiesch, in Switzerland, wrote to the Pope asking him to bless their prayer intended to stem the progression of the Aletsch glacier and spare their village. Heeded beyond all expectations, they beg him today to reverse the prayer and slow down the inexorable melting of the largest glacier in Europe. Off-camera, the human footprint completely covers the crime scene. Driven by his appetite for comfort and an intact faith in technology as the ultimate savior, man continues his march. In the ice cores that he carefully studies, he is able to discern climatic variations over millennia. The air bubbles locked in the ice are so many history capsules, revealing the secrets of time one by one. The animal is never represented directly by the artist either. Bruised in its diversity, it appears as a parietal reminiscence – a fantasy between an improbable future and a distant past, which pushes certain scientists to want, in a moment of technological epiphany, to court science fiction by resurrecting the mammoth from DNA discovered in the ice floe. Giant pachyderms would repopulate the tundra and their presence would offset the emission of greenhouse gases... Human history has a meeting with the history of the Earth.