“I try to convince that we have to change our way of life”

After Robert Doisneau last year, another great French photographer is honored this summer at the castle of Sully-sur-Loire. The castle exhibits a hundred photos by Yann Arthus-Bertrand. From his first shots taken in Kenya in the 1970s to the series “Earth seen from the sky” and “Portraits of French people”, the photographer looks back on his own journey and invites reflection on the state of the world, threatened by global warming. Maintenance.

The exhibition is entitled “Legacy”, and this is obviously no coincidence…

Yann Arthus-Bertrand : “Legacy”, it means heritage, and the legacy my generation will leave is not necessarily a glorious legacy. When I was 30 and studying lions, we didn’t talk about climate change. At the time, the lions were threatened; today, it is men who are threatened: we are talking about the end of the world, after all! This is what we read in the reports of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), and we all live in a kind of collective denial. This exhibition is truly an invitation to reflect, all together, to what we can do. I’m no better than the others, but over the years I’ve learned to look at the world in a different way.

Can we today be an ecologist and an optimist at the same time?

I don’t remember who said: “I prefer to be optimistic because it’s better for my health!” Well, if we look the truth in the face, it’s scary… Right now, we’re having a heat wave like we’ve never had, you have to understand that the climate we had for 10,000 years and on which our civilization was built is gone forever. We’re going to have to live with it, and it’s complicated because we all depend on growth, there is no growth today without fossil fuels, and this fossil fuel is killing us, basically… We’re in a sort of trap, so I’m trying to convince people that we have to try to change the way we live.

This exhibition also retraces your professional career. What was your first photographic emotion, the eye in the viewfinder?

In fact, I’ve always been interested in photography, my father took a lot of photos, I was kind of born into that. But I became a photographer by chance, initially I wanted to become a scientist and study lions in Kenya. In the end, lions really taught me photography! But I also arrived in an era, in the 80s, which was a golden age for photography, with newspapers like “Géo” and “National Geographic”, it is now much more difficult to live of his pictures.

Then there was “Earth from Above”, which was a turning point for you…

I embarked on this adventure in 1993, with the transition to the year 2000 in my sights, and I never would have imagined that this work would take on such proportions. And it’s true that it’s a job that has completely transformed me, because I discovered both the activism of NGOs, poverty, the beauty of the world… And the success of the book was unheard of, it is still currently the best-selling photo book in the world. And in the end, it happened because all the museums refused our images, and so we had to exhibit them in the street, which gave them incredible publicity. Life is not a straight line, but I often tell myself that I never missed my chance.

PRACTICE : the “Legacy” exhibition at the Château de Sully-sur-Loire is on display until November 6, accompanied by the screening of the documentary film “Legacy”, produced in 2021 by Yann Arthus-Bertrand. The castle is open every day during the summer, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Access to the exhibition is included in the price of the entrance ticket (€11 full price, €6 reduced price).