Fisheye Through the eyes of Émilie Möri: the chilling threat of inaction
- Emilie Mori
- Jan 2, 2024
- 2 min read
Updated: Mar 12
“This collage is a cry of alarm, a dramatic fiction where summer carefreeness and a worrying polar horizon collide. I wanted to create a surreal, striking and luminous scene.”
Through the eyes of Émilie Möri: the chilling threat of inaction
This week, we delve into the eye of Émilie Möri, a French photographer who likes to compose images in watered-down hues, driven by raw emotion. For Fisheye, she looks back at one of her collages, which denounces mass summer tourism.
“I created this image in the summer of 2019. I was leaving my main place of residence on the usually quiet Atlantic Ocean for two months to escape summer overtourism. I then imagined a collage, merging an iceberg engraved in my memory since a trip to Argentina in 2008, with the beach I was leaving behind. Little frequented that day, it appeared to me in pastel shades. This was a deliberate contrast to the sweltering heat of the season and the theme of the image, melting ice and global warming. My intention was to take some shots of this place before I left, motivated by a deep dismay at tourists' indifference to the environment. I was shocked by their carelessness, manifested in the garbage dumped on the sand, without even a glance at the ocean.
This prompted me to ask myself: “What would it take to wake humanity up to climate disorder? How would we react if the melting ice became visible from our French shores? How can we represent the threat of inaction?” This collage is a cry of alarm, a dramatic fiction where summer carefreeness and the worrying polar horizon collide. I wanted to create a surreal, striking and luminous scene. The superimposition of two photographs, combined with recoloring, transports us into a parallel world, where we can almost hear the sound of the glacier moving in an eerie silence. To nuance the tones, I first converted the print to black and white, then meticulously colored each element using Photoshop. The result is a striking contrast: a refreshing aesthetic that clashes with the gravity of the subject. Despite the number of images I've made since 2012, this work remains ingrained in my mind, and its relevance, alas, only increases with time.”