Roads Over Troubled Water: A quest for the soul -- Une chasse a l'ame (English and French Edition)

French photographer Sophie Zenon has been travelling across Asia for more than ten years now. Initially, she spent a lot of time in Mongolia, Siberia and the Amur river basin, capturing both the enormous grandiosity of these areas and the population’s harmony with nature and the divine. Zenon then continued her ‘quest for the soul’: between Siem Reap and Kratie, past Phnom Penh to the Gulf of Siam, she allows herself to be carried away on the waters of Tonlé Sap and the Mekong.

The relationship between water and the landscape is made crystal clear in Zenon’s panoramas. Water is the basis of life, and therefore of thought. Water is omnipresent, forming an inextricable whole with its environment, being its cause. Sophie Zenon’s way of working transcends several fundamental photographic principles. On the one hand, in her landscape photography she places nature at the fore in an almost literary manner by expressing philosophical reflections on the role of elements in nature via forms and shadows.

On the other hand, just like Henri Cartier Bresson, she has mastered the art of capturing short-lived and unique moments. One of Zenon’s sources of inspiration is the Finnish master in both genres, Pentti Sammallahti.

Roads Over Troubled Water is an exceptional piece of design, printing and binding. The book is a work of art in itself, with its landscape format of 24 x 9 cm, some fifty photos printed in duotone, and its leporello binding. With a separate text book (bilingual English/ French), in a slipcase.