- Photographs: Charles Xelot
- Texts: Charles Xelot
- Design: Ramon Pez
- 53 color photographs
- 25 duotone photographs
- 144 pages
- 16.5 x 21 cm
- Softcover
- English/French
- ISBN: 978-2-492696-19-0
- Orders will be shipped immediately following the opening week of the Rencontres d’Arles
- This book was supported by the Région Sud – Provence-Alpes-Côte-d’Azur
“White Water” is a visual and narrative exploration of the Northern Sea Route, the maritime corridor that connects Europe to Asia along the Russian Arctic coastline.
For months, Charles Xelot sailed through the Arctic ice, photographing tankers and icebreakers crossing the polar night, as well as the quiet intimacy of overheated cabins and the monotony of life at sea.
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the book
It took Charles Xelot years of persistence to obtain permission to board these vessels and join the sailors of the Russian Arctic at the edge of the world.
When the war in Ukraine began, he was at sea. The journey suddenly shifted: behind the icy landscapes and monumental infrastructures emerged the fragility of a world beginning to fracture.
Conceived as a logbook, “White Water” combines large photographic sequences with travel journals bringing together personal notes, maps and snapshots of everyday life.
Moving between documentary and intimate narrative, the book explores a world of ice, steel and silence.
A distant, almost unreal world that nevertheless reveals something deeply contemporary about our civilization, its infrastructures, and the men and women who keep it moving at the edge of the world.
Charles Xelot is a French photographer and visual artist born in 1985. For more than a decade, he has explored the physical and human frontiers of contemporary society, examining how people inhabit, transform and exploit extreme environments.
Trained in environmental sciences before turning to photography, he began his career alongside publisher and photographer Ahmet Ertuğ. His work soon led him to travel through remote and difficult-to-access regions, from the Russian Arctic to the polar seas.
His practice focuses on the points where human infrastructures meet extreme landscapes. Through photography, books, and more recently installation-based works, he develops a body of work situated between documentary practice and a more contemporary, narrative approach to the image.
Charles Xelot has collaborated with major corporations and cultural foundations. His work has been widely exhibited and published in “British Journal of Photography”, “Le Figaro Magazine”, Greenpeace publications, and numerous international media outlets.