When the Mountain Took the Place of my Father

Victoire Eouzan

2014-2019 — French Alps, France

About this series

Two years after my father died, my family and I walked the Tour du Mont-Blanc. I took a lot of photographs up there. When we came back, I looked at the pictures I took and realized how they were triggering a lot of memories. I was able to remember the exact moment of the photograph, how I felt, where I was. I also realized that somehow the mountain had healed us by giving us a direction to look at: we were moving forward. 

As the mountain started to embody my father, I decided to change the orientation of my photographs. I began to take pictures as portrait instead of landscape. 

The mountain stands as a monument in front of us, becoming the portrait of my father that somehow would never go away, and thus keeping him alive.

Photographer: Victoire Eouzan
Nationality: French
Based in: Amsterdam, Netherlands
Website: www.victoireeouzan.com
Instagram: @victoireeouzan

Victoire Eouzan is a French artist who will graduate in 2019 from Gerrit Rietveld Academie with BA in Photography, and in 2020 from EnsAD with MA photo/video (double degree). She is currently in Amsterdam.

Victoire Eouzan uses photography to question the role of images. Events from her personal life feed her work; she works with the power of images to trigger memories — images that suggest other images, and she creates her own image archaeology. In her practice, she also likes to confront techniques from different fields, such as old photographic or printing process techniques with new technologies. 

Her project, When the Mountain Took the Place of my Father, is a praise to her father through the personification of mountains, of which she makes “portraits”. Through photography, Eouzan keeps the memory of her father alive.