Zeitgeist is a call for attention to the fragility of our world. This project aims to stage images in key places on our planet that convey magnificence and beauty and need our protection. My visual vocabulary is one of poetry, close to surrealism. My goal is to create a powerful emotion to provoke mindfulness. I use photography as a tool: it allows me to use reality as a material to convey a metaphor, to give a new depth to reality. The multiple crises we are going through have shown us even more sharply how fragile our world is. So I had the urge to create work to embody this idea. The image of Red ghosts, the Zeit-geist, turning up in meaningful places, came to mind. Their presence, sometimes enigmatic, sometimes spectacular, reminds us of what these places represent, contain, or allow. Fleeting guardians of natural sites or man-made environments, they whisper to the viewer to remain aware of how precious our world and our values are. The project has two directions of exploration:  Environment preservation: Climate change, Ocean preservation, Biodiversity Riches, andCultural preservation: heritage, artistic and cultural values. Artdoc honoured my work by presenting the first Zeitgeist shots related to culture (photo-graphed during the second Paris lockdown) in the online show Dada & Democracy.

About

Hélène Guétary started her career as a visual artist and worked with photography for many years. She published a book of her early work of «Tableau Photography» in collaboration with Patrice Casanova, Skindeep, with a foreword by the late Federico Fellini. She then worked on a project that lasted for two decades, Hypnopompia, an anthropological fiction sponsored by the Polaroid Corp using the 20x24 inches Polaroid camera. It has been exhibited in France and the US, featured in Zoom Magazine, Photographie, Camera Arts, Actuel, Liberation, among many international magazines. The Hypnopompia project led her to direct. She then concentrated on directing and writing. She has been working internationally for the past 20 years, directed numerous award-winning short programs, documentaries and fiction. She also conceived immersive videos for the Opera and wrote four published novels. Hélène recently returned to photography, inspired by the loneliness of the lockdown, and worked with herself as a model on two series: Me, Myself & I, a surreal photographic diary, and The Masked World, which has been exhibited in December 2020 at Galerie Basia Embiricos.