Thomas Dhellemmes: the path as image, the image as destiny

Not all artists seek to arrest the flow of time : some chase it like a wild animal, others cross it like a raging river. Thomas Dhellemmes belongs to this second genealogy: his photography is not an act of fixation, but of movement. He does not immobilize the moment, he puts it to flight. He does not preserve it, he relaunches it. His gaze is not that of a guardian, but of a wayfarer . Each image is a step, each Polaroid a white stone marking the path . There is no nostalgia, but a tension toward the unknown: thus, photography becomes an act of research, an exercise in loss and rediscovery. Thus, Pierres Blanches is not a collection of memories, but an atlas of trajectories . Not an archive of the past, but a laboratory of the present. Dhellemmes does not photograph to stop what flows: he photographs to demonstrate that the flow itself is the substance of life.

In Pierres Blanches, we witness not just a collection of images, but a true existential journey. Each Polaroid becomes a fragment of a journey, a mark left on the earth and in memory, as if photography were both a gesture of survival and revelation. Dhellemmes does not seek to capture the world in a definitive image: he passes through it, questions it, lets it flow. His compulsive practice of gluing, cutting, and assembling is not an aesthetic exercise, but a way of giving form to the disorder of life, of transforming ambiguity and failure into necessary traces .

Thus, the landscapes he traverses—from the solitary beaches of Normandy to the cliffs of Bornholm, from the gray skies of the North to the luminous lands of the Mediterranean—become mirrors of an inner journey. Each photograph is a white stone, a talisman that points not to the way back, but to the possibility of continuing to search. 

© Thomas Dhellemmes / Courtesy Polka Galerie 

There are artists who photograph to stop time, and others who photograph to chase it. Thomas Dhellemmes belongs to the latter: his work is a visual pilgrimage, a thread of crumbs that leads not to a return, but to a continuous, fertile disorientation.

The exhibition Pierres Blanches , presented by Polka Gallery and accompanied by the volume published by Filigranes , brings together twenty years of solitary journeys. Thomas Dhellemmes traverses landscapes that oscillate between melancholy and revelation: the deserted beaches of Normandy, the fogs of Northern Europe, the Japanese cliffs of Teshima , the Mediterranean coasts. Each image is a talisman, a white stone marking the path of a small, contemporary Tom Thumb , incapable of stopping searching for his own path.

The medium chosen— instant photography —is not a nostalgic whim, but a radical act. The Polaroid, with its unstable chemistry and imperfect edges, becomes for Dhellemmes a field of tension: violence and fragility, hardness and failure. As in Cy Twombly , imperfection becomes language, matter itself becomes thought. Each shot is a fragment that opens to new metamorphoses: from positive to negative, from paper to the darkness of the darkroom, in a cycle that transforms the instant into duration.

But what's striking, beyond the technique, is the existential stance. Dhellemmes photographs as he breathes: compulsively, with the need to collect and paste images, even the "ambiguous" ones, the scraps, the failures. There's no reassuring selection, but rather an archive of fragility that becomes living memory. In this sense, Pierres Blanches is more than just an exhibition: it's a survival diary, a secular missive that transforms the landscape into prayer.

" They were happy moments, and I was alive ," says the artist. Perhaps this is the key: photography as proof of existence, as testimony to a passage. The white stones that emerge in his images are not signs of return, but of resistance. They are the remains of a journey that never ends, but is renewed.

In an age when photography risks becoming a matter of rapid and decorative consumption, Dhellemmes reminds us that it can still be an act of faith: fragile, unstable, but necessary. Pierres Blanches is thus an invitation to walk through time, to pause in the moment, to recognize that beauty is never definitive, but always poised between loss and revelation. Pierres Blanches is presented by Polka Gallery and accompanied by a volume published by Filigranes . The exhibition brings together twenty years of Thomas Dhellemmes and will be open throughout the winter until the end of January, transforming the exhibition space into an atlas of visual trajectories and talismans. An opportunity to pause in the moment and recognize, through the fragility of instant photography, that beauty can never be fully captured, but continues to reveal itself in movement.

The exhibition Pierres Blanches by Thomas Dhellemmes is on view at the Polka Galerie in Paris from November 14, 2025 to January 17, 2026.

Practical information

• Location: Polka Galerie, Cour de Venise, 12 rue Saint-Gilles, 75003 Paris

• Dates: November 14, 2025 , to January 17, 2026

• Opening hours: Tuesday to Saturday, 11:00 – 19:30

• Contact: +33 (0)1 76 21 41 30 – contact@polkagalerie.com

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