This book is conceived as a tale. For painter and photographer Bernard Guillot, the studio itself moves, places fascinating and holding him for years as he explores and probes them, wrestling with himself, the individuals he meets, forms and light, in an inner theatre; the hotel where he lives in Cairo is one such place, forever open, door after door, to a long journey no longer Ariane's own, one also of metamorphosis, paralleling that of the individual across a life, a cosmogony unfolding within the image's square format, a poetic drift tied to the instant of the long exposure, right here. The book won the 2003 Nadar Prize after five rounds of voting.