by John Cuénin

Even though he still speaks about others, Eric Antoine stopped taking portraits. Since 2015, it has been an absolute choice: no more faces in his images. Since 2020, not even a photograph of a human being. “In 2014, I had the feeling I had taken my best portrait, and I stopped.” The sentence is simple. It says everything about a man who only moves forward after he has fully exhausted something.

The break can also be explained by a weariness. Wet collodion photography—the 19th-century technique in which the image sets on a glass plate within minutes, and which the photographer has been using for 15 years—became, in many hands, a mere tool for tight, retro, poorly mastered portraits. “The majority of people using wet collodion in 2026 are, in my opinion, making bad portraits. That accounts for 80% of its use. Yet it’s a brilliant tool that can be used for so many other things in contemporary art.”

So how does one make a portrait of someone without photographing them? Eric Antoine stacks paper. Sheets drawn from family history: his sister’s childhood drawings, his mother’s notebooks, property deeds going back to the 19th century, his mother’s school dictionary. He layered them one on top of another, slipping in spheres, sand, and folded-paper polyhedra, then photographed the whole. These images form his series titled “Cerveaux” (“Brains”).

Left: Cerveau XXXII, 2024 | Ambrotype | 15.75 x 15.75 inches 

Right: Tidy XIX, 2026 | Ambrotype | 15.75 x 15.75 inches

“These images became my portraits,” he says. “Each stack of sheets is a person. It represents a person and the inside of their brain. Each sheet represents a memory.” Through practice, Eric Antoine developed his own symbolic language, inspired by the paintings of the 16th and 17th centuries. Entirely poetic. A small round sphere: an illness. Several small books: children. A dictionary at the bottom of the stack: education. Polyhedra appearing mid-stack evoke “the restructuring of a somewhat disordered life”—like a wisdom that arrives at the midpoint of an existence. People who know his work, he said, can recognize these subtle meanings: “They say: that’s more or less a turbulent life.”

Left: Olivier XLIII, 2026 | Ambrotype | 15.75 x 15.75 inches
Right: Shores II, 2024 | Ambrotype | 15.75 x 15.75 inches

This language has only one true subject. “Almost all of my work deals with the passage of time.” Each stack is an entire life held in balance: “It’s the totality of someone’s life on a stack placed on a table.” The layers of paper tell what the classic portrait sometimes never shows—the accumulated depth of an existence, its strata, its contradictions, its true weight. What written description struggles to convey is the materiality. Because Eric Antoine does not print his photographs on paper. His images are ambrotypes—40 centimeter glass plates coated with collodion and iron sulfate that look like no other image. 

“My photos as JPEGs render absolutely nothing,” he says. “On the other hand, held in the hand, they weigh six kilos, they gleam in every direction, and they are three-dimensional.” The shift from negative to positive—depending on the angle at which it is viewed— produces something magical. “For me, it is a sculpture before it is a photograph.” Everything in his process is made by hand. The chemicals, which he prepares himself so as not to depend on any supplier. The frames. His cameras, custom-built by a craftsman in Bulgaria, fitted with gutters to drain the moisture produced by the process. “I have this DIY culture. I’ve been skateboarding for 37 years. I’ve always made my own things.” Behind the method lies a philosophy. “I love going to restaurants where there are only two dishes. Limiting my space and what I look at allows me to do two things: one, know it better, and two, be more creative.” It’s like, he said, deciding not to have twenty relationships at the same time: the constraint liberates.

Useful Lies XIV, 2025 | Ambrotype | 11.75 x 15.75 inches

The same place, again and again 

A former visual reporter, Eric Antoine spent 15 years traveling the world for magazines. Since 2010, he no longer travels, worn out by a kind of photography he describes as spectacular. He lives in a village in the Vosges mountains, on the edge of a forest, with his partner and daughter, surrounded by a garden of Japanese maples and kanzan cherry trees growing up around him. He photographs what is in front of him. “Photographing something that is not naturally beautiful—a stack of leaves, a small sphere—is in a way pushing the exercise even further, photographing the non-sensational.” He has been photographing the same trees, the same rivers, the same clearings for ten years. Twice a year, he returns to the same point in the same landscape to retake the same image. “I don’t change my subject—my subject changes." 

This logic of repetition, he readily connects to the artist Roman Opalka, who photographed himself every day from 1965 until his death, gradually fading the luminosity toward total white. A work about aging, about death. “I consider myself a repeating artist,” adds Eric Antoine. In this logic, each new image is not a different subject but the same thing seen differently—or the same thing in the process of changing. Sometimes, he said, he retakes the same photograph thirty times before wanting to show it: “I’d like to think: I tried this photograph five hundred times. Is there a difference between the first and the five hundredth?”
 

This obsession with returning to the same place also ended up producing something of broader value: a documentation of climate change and of human intervention in forests. “When I realized I had become attached to a tree and that it had been cut down two weeks later, I started thinking: we cut down a lot of trees.” Today, certain areas he has frequented for fifteen years have, he said, not changed at all. White zones, abandoned, where no one has passed but him.
 

Midpoint

Éric Antoine’s third book is called Mitan. An old French word designating the middle of a space and a time—one of the rare terms, notes the historian Pierre Wat in the text accompanying the volume, to speak simultaneously of space and time. “The book is called ”Mitan“ precisely because I am 50. I consider that I am at the midpoint of my career, at the midpoint of my life.”

La Magel automne, 2023 | Ambrotype | 14  x 15.75 inches 

The publisher is Hemeria, which had previously published Useful Lies in 2021. Hemeria operates on a bookfunding model: books are financed through pre-orders, with readers directly supporting production by choosing from several tiers, from a single copy to an original ambrotype framed by the artist. It is also a commitment to material quality: Hemeria’s volumes are carefully crafted objects, designed to render as faithfully as possible the tonal qualities of the unique works they reproduce. Mitan, printed in two colors with selective varnish across 180 pages, is accompanied by an eight-page section printed in five colors.

Mitan is the third installment of a five-book cycle, conceived since 2015 as a progression from black to white. Ensemble Seul (“Alone Together,” 2015) had a black cover. Useful Lies (2021), anthracite. Mitan has a grey cover, in fabric, embossed. There will be two more, progressively lighter, through to 2035—“if all goes well,” Antoine said with quiet irony.

Pierre Wat reads this autobiographical cycle as a body of work inseparable from a life: from where the artist lives, his age, his way of living. Eric Antoine confirms: his work does not leave his home, nor the handful of places he has frequented for years. “It resembles me two hundred percent.” And in Antoine’s work there is a statement he rarely formulates directly, yet which runs through something that pleases and calms you rather than seeking it at the ends of the earth.”

This message—simplicity as an artistic choice and as a way of life—earned him the attention of communities he had not sought out. Degrowth activists reached out after an article in the French newspaper Libération, seeing in his use of an artisanal process a coherence with their movement. But Antoine rejected that label just as firmly as the one casting him as a nostalgic for the 19th century. When Libération described him as a “an ayatollah flea-market dealer of 19th-century photography,” he replied: “I’m a 50-year-old skateboarder who grew up in cities, and I have the presumption to be making contemporary art, not to be a backward-looking revisitor of an old process.”

Arbre XV, 2024 | Ambrotype | 15.75 x 15.75 inches

It is perhaps for this reason that Eric Antoine feels more at ease outside photography galleries strictly speaking. Also a curator, he was preparing for the autumn an exhibition in a four-square-meter space in Saint-Germain-des-Prés (Paris) built around a manifesto for small, intimate photography. Artists such as Michael Ackermann were to participate, with one constraint: no print could exceed 15 centimeters. A program of lectures was also planned in parallel at the MEP (Maison Europeenne de la Photographie). “It’s a reaction to all this ultra-immersive photography with large backlit prints that are destroyed afterwards. I’m curating a show about the small intimate image that you keep in your pocket and look at in your wallet.”
 

None of this prevents Eric Antoine from achieving success. At Paris Photo, where he exhibited solo, he sold 32 photographs in a matter of days. Sold out. His works are primarily held in contemporary art galleries. A collector waiting list exists for each of his series. He explained: the fact of having adapted his way of life to his simple needs, of not depending on a sometimes capricious photography industry, of making everything himself, allowed him to live as he chose. Therefore, Eric Antoine is a photographer who works, entirely free, like a craftsman, in a studio that is also his home.