EN FR
(SAIF x LA KABINE 2024 Emerging Talent Award Winner)
Loin des centres, loin des normes, certains réinventent la liberté dans les marges. Ce travail photographique donne à voir des existences que notre société préfère souvent oublier.
Le Bois de la dauphine, by Elsa Beaumont
This photographic series is the second chapter of a long-term project within a grassroots solidarity collective based in the Cévennes region of southern France.
Since its founding in 1985, the collective has acquired abandoned buildings and transformed them into shelters for marginalized individuals. This work seeks to make visible the life paths that take shape and speak out on the edges of society.
“I also see in it the experimentation of an alternative form of freedom, invented by those rejected by the dominant model*, in places left behind because they are no longer profitable or exploitable.”
In 2020, the community took over a former mountain hotel, perched 1,560 meters up on Mont Aigoual: the Hôtel du Bois de la Dauphine. Built in 1907 for early mountain tourism, it fell into disuse for 30 years. In 1944, Resistance fighters found refuge there, only for it to be burned by retreating German troops. Rebuilt in the 1970s to host Perrier factory workers’ families on vacation, it was once again abandoned, then squatted, and again set on fire.
Today, seven people live there, in a massive concrete block of 2,230 m², spread across three floors and around sixty rooms. This brutalist UFO of a building, lost in wind-swept, rain-beaten mountains, feels suspended outside time and space.
Living here means isolation, no nearby towns, barely any transport. It’s a personal test, a retreat from the world, a radical need to step aside.
When Elsa photographs the place, she knows the people she sees might not be there next time. There’s a quiet sense of vanishing, of things slipping away, captured in the everyday fragments of this strange, in-between world.
As she photographs, the hotel’s massive presence contrasts with an almost weightless atmosphere, a mirage-like quality where layers of past and present lives emerge subtly. The tension between the vast, half-empty building and the few, scattered human figures becomes a central theme.
Stains, creases, objects, traces, fragile and poetic attempts to make this place a home. Elsa doesn't focus on individuals as subjects; they become part of a whole made of shapes, textures, light and shadow. Her perspective shifts, a wall corner, a fogged-up window, a half-seen body. Everything is part of a haunting visual puzzle.
Sometimes, figures appear lost in thought, gazing through misted glass that blurs the view outside. Her images float between interior and exterior, between shelter and exposure, a metaphor for how we exist in the world and how (or if) we belong.
Can this place truly welcome people, or does it always end up pushing them away?
Did its inhabitants choose the margins… or did the world push them there?
* Inspired by filmmaker Chris Marker’s words in Sans Soleil
This project was supported by the DRAC Occitanie.
Elsa Beaumont takes a deeply human, socially engaged approach to photography. Her long-term projects focus on the inner worlds and lived spaces of people excluded from the mainstream, crafting visual narratives where light and material meet with raw emotion.
Her work dismantles stereotypes, builds empathy, and invites us to see “the other” in all their complexity and beauty.
A graduate of the École des Beaux-Arts in Montpellier and the École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie in Arles, Elsa has won the SAIF x La Kabine Emerging Talent Award, the Maison Blanche Prize, and received a special mention from the FOCALE Prize. She has been a finalist for both the Mentor and QPN awards.
Her photos have been widely exhibited across festivals, galleries and art centers including:
Galerie FOCALE (Nyon, Switzerland), Institut d’Art Contemporain (Le Vigan), Les Boutographies (Montpellier), Itinéraires des Photographes Voyageurs (Bordeaux), Festival QPN (Nantes), Festival 9PH (Lyon), Les Photographiques (Le Mans), Les Nuits Photographiques de Pierrevert, and Fisheye Gallery at the Salon de la Photo (Paris).
Her work is supported by the DRAC Occitanie, the Occitanie Region, and the Gard Department.