“The more I document and read the colors of the waters, the more the information they contain multiplies and organizes itself, like the writing of the living, minerals, soil, space and climate. The most common underwater and oceanic landscape forms
a colorful expanse as vast as the eye can see. Through photography, monochrome painting joins landscape painting, yet vegetal and mineral elements are expressed not through the romantic representation of a rock or a mountain, the impressionistic touches of a field of flowers or the scintillation of light on the surface of the ocean, but through color and light alone. This color is that of the microscopic which becomes visible through accumulation, floating pigments, dynamic and free, whose saturation increases with depth...”, writes Nicolas Floc'h.

For Rivers Ocean, his new series, twinned with Productive Landscapes, he traces the course of water at their watersheds, from the Mississippi to the Rhône, from the Loire to the Seine. In quest of color, he photographs water beneath the surface, its nuances playing a part in shaping and transforming territories.
In 2022, he documented the Mississippi watershed from 224 water columns at as many sites, covering 31 states. Each column is a series of panoramic underwater photographs organized vertically according to the depth at which they were taken. Simultaneously, black-and-white series document the terrestrial space between

the multiple water-colored sites. This photographic survey of the watershed is that of the journey of visible or invisible water, atmospheric, inscribed in rocks, abundant in vegetation, displaced by agriculture, absent in arid zones...

For the Rencontres d’Arles, a selection of the photographs taken in the United States introduces the Rivers Ocean series. Based on a dozen of the 224 color points of water, the exhibition offers an immersion into the American landscape, the water cycle and the landscape of color.