Meditate with Laurent Ballesta (born in 1974)

“Today’s immersion has revealed a spherical iceberg, a circumference of about 200 m, with only 10 m visible above the water, which floats above the bottom. Polished by the current, it looks like a giant pebble. »»

When he discovered, in 2017, this mountain of ice-knitted ice cream at the Banquise, a few kilometers from the Dumont-d’Urville French base, in Adélie soil, a crazy idea germ in the head of French naturalist photographer Laurent Ballesta: to carry out the first natural photograph of the submerged part of an iceberg.

Because it is not just a question of diving and engaging your device. The depth, the darkness, the necessary distance to embrace such a massive subject – not to mention the cold – require a technicity of shooting and extremely refined postproduction.

The final image is actually made up of 147 shots, taken very closely, for three days, and digitally assembled. What we see is very real, and yet no human eye can see it.

Called Ice Monster – The ice monster – probably because of its gigantic size but also of the mouth and the eye that one believes to guess on the left part of the iceberg, this photo fascinates.

What does this hidden side represent for us? The dark share of nature that should be left in peace? Or a treasure that one can only discover hunty and in small touches; An invitation to consider that the surface, the place of appearances, always hides a beauty buried in the deep layers of reality, whether it is nature, others or ourselves?