“Arnaud Alain creates a film in which the photograph is no longer an object but a question. His work does not ask how to see again; it asks what it means to continue creating images to stay alive.”

Dimitri is a photographer whose work has long depended on discretion and proximity. His images were produced in close and often intimate environments where the success of the photograph relied on his ability to become almost imperceptible. To photograph meant to withdraw, to allow others to exist without being altered by the act of looking. This invisibility was not technical but ethical; it structured his relationship to bodies, space, and trust. His visual fragility establishes the film’s central question: what remains of a photographic practice when vision, the very condition that once made it possible, begins to fail?

The film unfolds when this balance collapses. Dimitri has lost his central vision and can no longer perceive color. In the disappearance of not only an optical capacity but an entire mode of being in the world, his camera remains in his hand, but the gesture has lost its certainty. Photographing becomes an act of reconstruction: he relies on memory, on general contours, on an intuitive mapping of distance that can no longer be verified. Images are no longer captured; they are anticipated, guessed, assembled from fragments of overwhelming sensations.

It all starts with Arnaud Alain’s central formal decision to shift the point of view away from the photographer toward the photographed space. By doing so, Alain makes palpable the interval that precedes the image: the hesitation, the calibration of proximity, the risk of intrusion. The act of photographing is revealed as a dialogue rather than a full-on mastery. This displacement also makes visible what has changed: Dimitri’s presence now carries weight. Where he once dissolved into situations, he now feels himself as an excess and a body that cannot disappear. The loss is therefore both relational and visual. Dimitri’s earlier practice is evoked through his own descriptions, as well as old photos. He recalls a way of working based on ease and discretion, moving through intimate situations without disturbing their balance. That remembered fluidity stands in sharp contrast to his present hesitation. The change affects how close he can stand, how long he can remain, and the amount of space his body occupies. Photography no longer feels like immersion but like exposure, for himself but also for those in front of the lens.

The Hidden Face of the Earth is also a dialogue between two friends and, by extension, between two cameras. Alain’s camera does not observe Dimitri from a distance; it accompanies him, responds to his hesitations, and registers the moments where control falters. The film becomes a shared practice rather than a mere portrait where one camera compensates for the uncertainty of the other. Dimitri continues to photograph even when the loss of visual mastery becomes evident, and the framing slips into approximation and certainty gives way to risk. Photography remains for Dimitri a form of attachment to the world, sustained not by sight but by the desire to continue looking.

At one point, Dimitri suggests that the film is documenting his depression instead of his process of image-making. The difficulty of photographing is inseparable from a psychological condition marked by isolation and the sense of an interrupted trajectory. His repeated insistence on the injustice of his situation does not seek pathos; it expresses the experience of a practice that can no longer rely on its founding gesture. Alain does not attempt to restore Dimitri’s former way of seeing. Instead, the film accompanies the construction of another sensibility, one that operates through memory, touch, and affective orientation. Photography becomes less an act of visual capture than a means of maintaining a relation to others despite the erosion of visual certainty.

The title ultimately points to this shift. The hidden face is not a concealed landscape but a transformed mode of perception. The earth that the film reveals is one apprehended through residual light, through contours and recollection rather than through direct sight. The desire to remain in contact with the world and with others persists for Dimitri, even when the image can no longer guarantee its own clarity. And by aligning its form with this condition, Arnaud Alain creates a film in which the photograph is no longer an object but a question. His work does not ask how to see again; it asks what it means to continue creating images to stay alive.