"Photography alone is too smooth for me. Through the process of scraping, I lift the coloured paper to reveal the white beneath. I know an image is finished when only the essential remains."
Raphaëlle Peria
Raphaëlle Peria's practice brings together photography, engraving and sculpture. Using engraving and surgical tools, she scratches and erases the printed surface of her photographs, revealing the white support beneath. "White is the colour of oblivion; the things I erase are those I have forgotten", she says.
The act of scratching the photographic surface is not destructive but revelatory: light, texture and relief emerge from the image itself. Hidden forms and latent presences gradually emerge, creating hauntingly poetic images suspended between absence and presence, disappearance and persistence. Like a sculptor, by removing the unneccessary, Peria actually adds meaning.
Landscapes, trees and fragile ecosystems are recurring motifs in Peria's work. Her works reflect both the beauty and vulnerability of plant life and environmental change. Rather than simply documenting nature, she turns it into a tactile space where ecological fragility becomes visible.
These concerns converge in her project Traversée du fragment manquant (Crossing the Missing Fragment) based on a rediscovered family album documenting a childhood journey along the Canal du Midi. Combining archival and recent images, she retraces a landscape now altered by a fungal disease affecting the plane trees that once lined its banks. Through scraping and erasure, she memorialises these disappearing landscapes, crystallising memory, absence and loss. For this project, she was awarded the BMW Art Makers Prize (2025) in collaboration with curator Fanny Robin and it was presented at Les Rencontres d'Arles and Paris Photo.