Between the Marne, the Seine and the Oise, the Aisne is a little-known department: a land of passage, of invasion and of culture, at the crossroads of Champagne, Picardy, Nord-Pas-de-Calais, the Île-de-France and Belgium, with many battle sites of the Great War. Antoine Dambrine criss-crossed it, paying attention to the landscapes and above all to the soil, which is mostly clay. The way he treats the black and white images, which he prints himself, refers to the brown-yellow tones of loamy, ochreous or marl clay. After Granits, dedicated to the Breton and Scottish coasts, comes Argiles.

“The subtle plates often play on slight variations of grey, imperceptible differences between trees, hay and road, between road and vegetation. The shades of grey reveal the beauty of small things: an abandoned barn or castle, silos that show off a magnificent and much maligned concrete, isolated trees standing in a plain like a monument to nature, a de Chirico castle, the repetition of military crosses in an infinite cemetery, forests, the rigorous geography of hay bales on an agricultural plain.” — Ariella Masboungi