Léonie Pondevie’s photographic practice is composite, taking shape through an aggregation of clues: contemporary photographs, collected archival images, and shared personal documents hang side by side on the wall like evidence from an ongoing investigation into complex and ever-changing realities. In *Un point bleu pâle*, Léonie Pondevie gazes at the sky, observing the weather. Just as her father doggedly recorded rainfall levels and temperatures in small notebooks, she assembles image fragments, awaiting their analysis. It is a kind of poetic distillation to which she subjects these images: her father’s notebooks and his records from another era, these archival images of her hometown, press clippings from the 1970s, the clouds ahead at the sea, a hand caressing an antediluvian granite, and raindrops on a loved one’s hood. The stratospheric and the extremely close, immensity and intimacy, impassive geological time and climate urgency—it’s all there, under the same sky. By placing her vantage point at the heart of her family history, Léonie Pondevie avoids a Manichean dichotomy: this photographic project, though expansive, makes no claim to elucidate anything but presents itself as a humble hypothesis. What the series *A Pale Blue Dot* depicts is the act of human experience; not the thing itself—the climate—but the ways in which we take it into account, from the observer who senses their own insignificance and modestly records the life of the clouds in small notebooks to its encapsulation by geo-engineers, neo-demiurges. From these distilled images emerges the reflection of a distant earth with which we have lost contact. And thus we grasp the simultaneous and paradoxical measure of our insignificance and our capacity for harm.
Léonie Pondevie (b. 1996) graduated from the École européenne supérieure d’art de Bretagne in Lorient in 2020. She is a member of the Collectif Nouveau Document and is based in Lorient.
