THE EMERALD FOREST
Opening Reception Thursday, March 12 from 6:00 PM to 10:00 PM // Exhibition from March 12 to April 4, 2026 // Galerie de la Clé – 23 rue Michel le Comte 75003 Paris
Galerie de la Clé is pleased to welcome young photographer Bastien Deschamps for an exploration of the heart of the Amazon. For this exhibition, Bastien Deschamps recounts two years of travel and immersion between 2023 and 2025 in Wayana Amerindian lands, French Guiana. Through his shared daily life, both in gold panner camps and within Wayana dwellings, he has captured through his lens the contours of a fragile and precarious way of life.
Without overlooking the upheavals caused by intensive gold panning in this still largely preserved region, and prioritizing immersion over direct judgment, he sought to humanely document the cross-cultural encounters in gold prospectors’ camps as well as among the Wayana Amerindians.
Through a documentary process with an aesthetic steeped in humanity, his photographs explore the daily lives of men and women grappling with an immediate need for survival beneath the immense, emerald-colored Amazonian canopy. Mostly analog, some of these prints were developed in the mercury-infested waters of the Maroni River itself, while others developed in black and white reveal traces of golden flakes.
This initiatory journey is retraced in the exhibition titled THE EMERALD FOREST, visible at Galerie de la Clé from March 12 to April 4, 2026. Opening Reception Thursday, March 12 from 6:00 PM to 10:00 PM.
Catalogue and information available at info@galeriedelacle.com or by phone at 01.42.77.25.42
“Gold is a dream to reach another dream.”
On the banks of the Maroni River, in French Guiana, this dream circulates from camp to camp. It promises a roof over one’s head, a cleared debt, a business of one’s own, a new start. To make it a reality, one must dig, divert, cut, and amalgamate. Turning the forest into a construction site, the earth into a scar.
Gold is almost nothing, yet it concentrates everything. Its rarity creates its value; its brilliance sustains the myth. It reassures those who possess it, fascinates those who seek it, and legitimizes the havoc it wreaks. Its weight is primarily imaginary. Its effects, however, are concrete. In the forest, far from the cities, a society is being rebuilt. Clandestine routes, carbets, improvised shops. Capital circulates under plastic tarps, by the light of generators. Investing, extracting, turning a profit—but also living, loving, and dreaming of elsewhere.
But the forest is not a backdrop. A source of life and a sacred territory for the Wayana Amerindian communities, it structures bonds and memories. When its waters become clouded, it is not just an ecosystem that falters, but an entire world.
In Guiana, the price we place on gold can be seen in the landscape: gaping craters, waters saturated with sediment and mercury. Value is decided elsewhere and leaves its mark here. Gold circulates. Dreams move. The forest, meanwhile, still bears the weight of a single flake.
– Bastien Deschamps, Montreuil, February 16, 2026
Bastien Deschamps belongs to that generation of photographers for whom engagement—in alterity with their photographic subjects—is an obvious creative necessity, a “how could it be otherwise” characteristic of his profession.
Let us not be misled by this young face which, like the tree hiding the forest, already represents a solid experience with powerful, long-term subjects, approached through a documentary lens.
From One Night Stand to Where The Border Runs: Tales From The River Sides, ranging from exploratory relationships to deeply introspective ones and even self-portraits, Bastien Deschamps tirelessly questions and examines, with uncontrollable determination, what constitutes and inhabits Us.
It is on a quest for the other—always so far, always so near—that he leads us, with him as the captain of a ship ready to brave all the seas of inner storms, for initiatory crossings from one shore of ourselves to the other.
Through seven projects of incredible intensity and poise, Bastien Deschamps confronts his intimate voice with the measure of our gaze. Obsessively exploring formal rendering techniques that stay as close as possible to the meaning, he opens a new line of tension with The Emerald Forest.
– Charlotte Flossaut, Paris, February 25, 2026
