In Un hiver d'oise, Thierry Girard gave up his usual approach of reporting on an itinerary and decided to build three sets of images inspired by the landscapes and constituent elements of the département. He made his current working concerns meet literary references also linked to this territory. The first part shows an attraction to the uniform vastness of the Picardy plateau, which Girard treated like his maritime and Atlantic landscapes. The second series is above all linked to the work of Nerval, the poet of the Valois, but also evokes Balzac's La Belle Noiseuse and therefore the question of representation: hence the idea of working on the ambiguity of the representation of the body in painting or religious statuary and of suggesting, through a few portraits of young girls and atmospheres of woods, a pictorial and literary universe of a slightly dark and melancholic romanticism, Nervalian in a way. The third part presents urban landscapes photographed with a 4 x 5 view camera, interested neither in monuments, nor in beautiful mansions, nor in picturesque farms, but in places of brick and grey that refer to the industrial and working-class history of the département and to an era symbolised by the work of Henri Barbusse. These three series do not say everything about the territory but offer three entries, three possible approaches, at once accurate and very subjective. The book is the result of an artist residency initiated by the conseil général and held from October 2007 to March 2008.