Night has long since fallen when one enters “Carbon Catchers.” The eye slowly adjusts to the darkness. Before us, trees rise out of the water, frozen in an almost unreal silence, while above them a sky saturated with stars opens up. Nothing seems artificial—and yet everything is. Thierry Cohen does not photograph the night as our cities produce it today; he patiently reconstructs it, as one might repair a damaged memory. Since 2017, the French artist has travelled through primary forests and wetlands—from the Polish-Belarusian border in Białowieża, to the marshes of Mississippi and Virginia, and to the Japanese island of Iriomote-jima—to compose a series that restores to landscapes their original sky.
In the continuity of the series “Darkened Cities,” the project unfolds as a nocturnal song addressed to forests. Each image results from a double gesture: on the one hand, slow photographic captures, made as if with a large-format camera; on the other, a process of digital recomposition in which the artist assembles a starry sky photographed far from any light pollution, at the same latitude as each site depicted. “Each work in this series is a hybrid creation, in which Thierry Cohen stitches together sky and earth, giving the forest back its stars—not just any stars, but precisely those we should be able to see,” the exhibition text explains.
But beyond its technical achievement, “Carbon Catchers” is above all a political and sensitive meditation on the disappearance of the night and the gradual erasure of our ecosystems. The title of the series refers to an image that is both protective and fragile: “In certain Indigenous cultures of North America, the dreamcatcher—the catcher of dreams—acts as a filter, capturing the dreams sent by spirits, preserving the beautiful images of the night and burning the bad visions at the first light of day,” Thierry Cohen recalls.
This symbolic filter is applied by the artist to our landscapes. In the marshes of Louisiana, submerged trunks seem to float between two worlds; in the undergrowth of Białowieża, vegetation forms a dense, almost impenetrable mass; on Iriomote-jima, the forest closes in on the gaze, abolishing any sense of depth. There, Cohen recounts having had to abandon any classical composition, seized by a living organism of dizzying complexity, unable to find even the slightest distance. The forest is no longer a backdrop: it becomes a presence.
The work is both documentary and fictional. Documentary, because it is rooted in territories where forests and wetlands play a fundamental role in carbon sequestration, climate regulation, and the preservation of biodiversity. Fictional, because the night is reconstructed and reinvented, brought back into proximity with its stars, sheltered from urban halos. Beneath the surface, these images remind us that the disappearance of darkness is one of the most silent symptoms of our ways of life: light pollution disrupts ecosystems, disorients nocturnal species, alters plant growth, and even affects our own biological rhythms.
In Thierry Cohen’s work, the forest also appears as a frontier. A frontier between a world of the past and a consumerist present; between a collective imagination shaped by undergrowth and a reality marked by their massive destruction. His images seek to reintroduce meaning into the representation of landscape and to awaken a sense of responsibility in the act of looking. Under these rediscovered skies, trees become silent sentinels. They absorb carbon, store memory, and continue—despite everything—to watch over our own future.
“Carbon Catchers,” by Thierry Cohen, is on view at the Maison départementale de la nature du Plan, in La Garde, near Toulon, France until 29 March 2026.
