The museum is delighted to welcome ‘Sol Salin I’ to the Photography Collection, a unique salt encrusted photograph by the French artist Ilanit Illouz.
This text is an extract from the essay ‘The Memory of Landscapes’, written by Fiona Rogers (V&A Parasol Foundation Curator of Women in Photography) and published in May 2024 to accompany Illouz’s solo exhibition ‘Sel Noir’ at Gallerie Anne-Laure Buffard.
Ilanit Illouz can be seen not just as an artist, but as an archaeologist. Like an intrepid explorer, she scours the landscape in search of the hidden, using a research-driven approach that mirrors archaeological excavation. Her resulting works are even ‘fossilised’, engrained with the raw fabric of time itself – of dust, sand, salt, earth and mineral. Like an archaeologist, Illouz seeks out ancient locations: the Mediterranean, the Dead Sea and the West Bank. Lands which hold memories but are being erased over time.
She asks: ‘How do you evoke a place whose landscape no longer bears any trace?’. Her work meditates on both personal and collective trauma, paying homage to her mother and the migratory experiences of countless others. Her abstracted political landscapes represent the sociopolitical issues of territory, borders, geography and independence. They are pointedly anonymous, simultaneously representing somewhere and nowhere, or the faint line between the personal and universal experience.
Illouz’s unique artistic process involves the delicate excavation of salt, soil, sand. It is a physical intervention which marks the land, and the artist, who leaves behind a trace of herself in the exchange. We can consider the act of ‘taking’. Of taking pictures, or something that does not belong to us, like a piece of land, a home, or someone’s rights. Many of Illouz’s destinations are the subject of historic and contemporary land conflicts, which appear crystalised onto the surface of her prints. They are places entangled in modern day battles over natural resource and the climate crisis, including the Dead Sea, whose precious salt is being unlawfully exploited and where 1000 sinkholes have appeared in the last 15 years. ‘Sinkhole’ translated into Illouz’s native French, is ‘Dolines’ – the name of this ongoing series.
Illouz’s use of salt carries a deeper meaning. It intersects with the history of trade, photography, and the Anthropocene. Salt both preserves and degrades, symbolizing the fragility of the environment and the power dynamics that shape our world. Photography’s early development, tied to the industrial and imperial age, mirrors salt’s journey across continents, influencing societies in similar ways. Salt was intrinsic to the experiments of Thomas Wedgwood (British, 1771–1805), Joseph Nicéphore Niépce (France, 1765–1833) and William Henry Fox Talbot (British, 1800–1877) who used salt solutions in early photographic processes including the ‘heliograph’ and produced the earliest known surviving photograph from nature, View from the Window at Le Gras (1826 or 1827).
Like these early pioneers, Illouz uses alchemy to create artworks with an other-worldly effect. After collecting her organic matter, she returns to her studio where a solution is applied to the surface of her photographic prints, often multiple times and over several months. There is a transformation. The result is a lunar landscape, shining with a million diamonds. A trojan horse which belies its complexity and pulls in the viewer. Illouz speaks of the catharsis of the whole ‘act’ – the walking, collecting, remembering, washing, erasing and forgetting. Her prints are an act of resistance, or an alternative archive of history. New life growing from roots of the past.
