In her photo essay C’était le diable qui se vengeait (It Was the Devil Taking His Revenge), the French artist Anne Leroy captures sites shaped by millennia of human history. The landscape of the Vézère Valley in southwestern France is particularly rich in prehistoric finds and cave paintings. The most famous of these is Lascaux. Over the course of the twentieth century, the discovery of these caves led to the revitalization of this remote rural region through modern tourism.

Through an observational visual language in which color photographs, monochrome images, and historical film stills alternate in sequence, Anne Leroy develops a discursive archaeology of specific sites around which complex constellations of narratives have formed. By unfolding an image-analytical dimension akin to the theoretically grounded “critical realism” practiced by Allan Sekula, the artist, through the presence of her documentation, makes visible the complex interweaving of the temporal dimensions contained within the respective sites.

The phenomenon of reconstitution runs like a thread through the images. The original is often far away, protected behind the thick copper doors that seal off the caves. Everything, from the casts of the walls of Lascaux intended for their replica (Lascaux III) to the transport crates of the traveling exhibition and the restoration workshops of the facsimiles, paradoxically exists in the field of tension between the absence of the originals and their technical reproducibility.

Anne Leroy speaks of the “spirit of places” to describe the methodology of her research. And indeed, despite the artificiality of their staging, it is the aura of the original images that is evoked. Visitors are not depicted. Rather, Anne Leroy is interested in the traces of the activities of those people who live in the Dordogne today and whose existence is closely linked to the presence of humanity’s earliest images—a humanity that, in the twenty-first century, is beset by the premonition of its own finitude. (Translation: Gérard A. Goodrow)