The Land of Spirits

The Land of Spirits is a collection of memories from a road trip through New England. It is a poetic exploration of the concepts of traces, impressions, photographic realism, and what constitutes tangible evidence of the passage of time.

Fifteen years ago, I was gifted a batch of expired Kodak Ektachrome 160T color reversal slide film, which I tested during a trip in Ireland. Since I was shooting mainly in daylight, the slides all had that characteristic dark blue cast typical of films balanced for tungsten lighting, and I was fascinated by how those dreamy colors brought out my memories of Ireland’s majestic landscapes.

I kept a few unexposed rolls from that batch, thinking I’d use them when the perfect project came along, but I let too many years pass. Finally, in 2024, when I began planning a road trip through New England in the United States, I thought it would be the ideal opportunity to reuse this special film and document my journey. I had naively believed that the result would be similar, but fifteen years of storage under less-than-ideal conditions and several moves across different countries had taken a toll on the film’s chemistry, and the slides didn’t come out with those deep blue images like they did the first time. Instead, they came out very pale and underexposed, in various shades of pink and purple, barely visible on the slides, and I thought the photos were lost. However film is more resilient than I thought, and through digital manipulations I was able to recover some images.

To my great surprise, although their aesthetic differs from that of the first series of photos that had made such a strong impression on me, they retain that same mystery, that otherworldly atmosphere that so perfectly captures the wild and mystical nature of these American landscapes. New England touched me deeply. Because of its resemblance to certain regions of my native France and because of its wild nature and the spirituality and stories that seemed to permeate every place we visited there. 

While photography is perceived as an “objective” medium, worthy of truth because of its ability to reproduce reality as it is, I do believe it also captures what is not always visible to the eye. These images are not 100% perfect depictions of the places I saw. They are more than that. Just a little strange and hazy, as if one were trying to describe a dream. It's almost as if the expired film, weathered by the passage of time, had served as a revelator for the ghosts and memories hidden within these places.