CASTLE ROCK

Deep in the Forest of Fontainebleau, a rock bears an ominous name: Rocher Fatal. For French photographer Philippe Jarrigeon, it became the starting point for a new eponymous book in which nature is never quite what it seems. Across its 160 pages, a landscape populated by deer and ancient trees collides with fake topiary, costumed figures that cosplay French aristocrats, improbable still lifes, and two Fiat Pandas in an unlikely embrace. Made over two years, the project moves between fashion photography, fairy tale, and environmental unease. Jarrigeon sat down with PIN–UP’s Felix Burrichter, a longtime collaborator, to discuss the power of the forest, the pleasure of artifice, and nature’s revenge.

Felix Burrichter: Rocher Fatal sounds like something you invented. But it’s a real place?

Philippe Jarrigeon: Absolutely. It’s the name of a very specific rock in the middle of the Forest of Fontainebleau. I found it when I was walking with my dog. At that time, I wanted to escape a little from Paris and create some distance from my commercial career. I wanted a life in the countryside, but still close to Paris. So I got a dog, then a little house, and fell completely in love with the forest. The book is an homage to it.

You told me something about the forest’s history: that its protection began with artists.

It’s an amazing story! It’s one of the first regional parks in the world, thanks to the artists. In the 19th century, painters came to Fontainebleau with the new train and said, “Look at this forest! It’s so beautiful. We have to protect it.” They began painting the landscape, and then the government decided to preserve it. In France, ecology comes from an aesthetic reason. It comes from artists, from painters. Isn’t that amazing? I didn’t know any of this when I moved there. I just knew it was beautiful.

One of the tensions running through the book is between wild nature and human intervention. You photograph forests and deer, but also very manicured topiary. Which is actually what brought us together, when you photographed the gardens of Marqueyssac for PIN–UP 20.

Yes! And it’s interesting because Fontainebleau is also a huge playground. Every weekend, people arrive from Paris with bicycles and go hiking or climbing. The forest is beautifully preserved, but everything looks a bit artificial. There are trees, there are roads; it looks like a landscape, but it’s also a bit like Disneyland. And since the fires affected parts of the forest last summer, the book has also taken on another dimension, as a tribute to this very special place and a reminder of why it’s worth protecting, both as a natural landscape and a space for the imagination. That relationship between the real and the fake is something I wanted to question. And there is a tension between our imaginary idea of the beauty of nature and what we actually do to it.

The images themselves seem to follow the logic of a dream. You move from the forest into the château — the famous Château de Fontainebleau — from a still life to a fashion picture. How did you map out the storyline for the book?

There was no real storyboard for the book. It was more about recreating what happens in your mind when you walk in a forest. You see something, then you start thinking about something else, and then something else. This book is a trip, like Alice in Wonderland. You open a piece of wood in the forest and suddenly you’re inside the castle, watching Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast. I wanted the book to create that feeling of going into your own story. All the images were shot specifically for the book. It was like an experimental workshop of two years of producing images. Sometimes I worked alone, sometimes with one assistant, sometimes with 12 or 20 people — stylists, designers, models. I always plan things, but something else happens all the time. Afterward, we spent two weeks with the designer Emmanuel Crivelli from Dual Room Studio trying to find the right order, as if we were editing a film.

There’s quite a lot of anthropomorphism. Even the cars seem to have personalities.

There are two [Fiat] Pandas in the forest, making babies to protect their species forever! In this book, cars, objects, animals — they’re also here to speak about ourselves. They are watching us. I like the fact that humans want to become plants, plants want to become objects, objects want to become animals. It’s a big anthropomorphic carnival. And at the end, nature takes revenge, with one of the characters crushed by the rock. It’s fatal in another way. It’s not a love story anymore.

And then there are the still lifes. The dice with ladybugs seem to be obeying their own rules.

Exactly. If you look carefully, there are mistakes in the dice. There is a contamination between the coccinelles [ladybugs] and the dice, and you can’t tell anymore what is alive. It’s about games, about chance. I like looking for chance. Maybe you don’t know this, but I’m a quadriphile: I collect four-leaf clovers. There’s one in the book, from my collection, to bring you luck. And I find them myself — I don’t want someone to give me one. I’m always looking for luck, and some of the things in the book come from my own collection. I also simply love making still lifes — assembling objects that don’t belong together to create a new meaning.

That darkness really arrives with the text by Laura Vazquez, which takes a much more unsettling approach to the forest.

Laura is a French poet. I invited her to write something starting from the names of the rocks, and she came back with this very dark text. She’s much darker than me! I wanted that contrast with the playfulness of my images. It brings a sense of tragedy — of what could happen if we keep treating the forest this way.

This is your second book, after Play. Why did this project need its own volume?

Play was my first monograph, a collection of about 15 years of photographs. Rocher Fatal is a project in itself. And my idea is to create a collection of books, a little like the comic-book albums we had as kids. So this is number one. Number two will take place somewhere else in the world, with another name. Maybe Egypt. We’ll see!