The photographer
Sébastien Kech
Fine art photographer · Founder of Skywaven Studios
Most of what I photograph is landscape: mist over water, a ridge at the hour the light turns, what a place gives only once. Wildlife, street scenes and architecture take the rest. Every image is printed in a limited edition of twenty, signed and numbered.
What I photograph
Landscape first, and by some distance. The other three themes are detours I never tire of.
How I got here
Curious about the world around me for as long as I can remember, I am a lifelong learner. I trained as a geophysicist and spent years on the question of how the Earth is put together: what folds a rock, what hollows out a valley, what a cloud is really doing up there. Then the lockdowns arrived and I set myself a challenge, which was to reach a professional level in photography. Studies, exams, and in the summer of 2021 a diploma with highest honours, which was more than I had hoped for. I had worked hard to get there: I cannot approach anything without taking it entirely seriously.
The science changed what I see. Standing in front of a landscape, I see the work that made it: water that cut, stone that held, and the narrow window in which the light will do something it will not do again. Science tells me why a place looks the way it does. Photography is where I try to say what it felt like to be standing there.
The rest I learned from painters. Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Georges de La Tour: light set against shadow until a face or a field arrives out of the dark. I look for the same thing outdoors, and I would rather wait three hours for one honest frame than come home with fifty ordinary ones. Each frame is a canvas.
What I am after is simple enough. That a photograph tells a story, that it works as an invitation to travel, and that it leaves you wanting to preserve the beauty of the world.
A thought in a picture
I also write. Sonnets, in French, in the classical form, and I have been at it a good deal longer than I have been photographing seriously. On this site every poem sits beside a photograph, almost always one of mine, because to me they are the same gesture made twice. Goethe said it better than I could.
“What is poetry? A thought in a picture.”Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Poussière d’étoile errante en l’immensité,
Pensante matière, vérité de l’étant ?
Lancé sur orbite, dans l’espace et le temps,
Je dérive dans la libre exiguïté,Métastrophysique, January 2016
This one, Métastrophysique, is about stardust, orbit, gravity and the cosmological horizon that hides the rest. It sits next to a photograph of the Milky Way made at Ault, on the Picardy coast.
Which brings me back to the word itself. Photography means writing with light, and that is a perfect compromise for someone like me, somewhere between art and science. An image rests, in the end, on the optical behaviour of light and on that old duality of wave and particle that quantum mechanics describes, put to work here for something entirely useless and entirely necessary.
A touch metaphysical, don’t you think?
Recognition
Since 2023, my work has received 53 distinctions in 12 international professional competitions.
Qualifications and certifications
Photography diploma, 2021
A French state vocational diploma in photography (BEP), awarded by the Académie de Versailles in 2021: shooting, image processing, technology and art studies. Passed with an average of 18 out of 20, the equivalent of highest honours.
Certified drone pilot, 2025
Certificates issued by the French civil aviation authority (DGAC) and valid throughout the European Union: Open category (A1/A3 and A2) and the theoretical certificate for standard scenarios (STS), after professional remote pilot training. The first aerial views are still to come.
About the prints
Limited edition of 20 prints
Every photograph is shot and edited by me, then printed by a laboratory that specialises in fine art photography. Each print is issued in an edition of twenty worldwide, signed and numbered.
Made to order
You choose the size, the material and the frame. Other sizes and materials are available on request. If you are unsure, write to me before you order: I would rather advise you than let you end up with a print that does not suit you.
Image licensing
Available on request for certain photographs, to illustrate books, magazines and websites, or for exhibitions. Latest publication: Path to the Milky Way, full page in Magny Mag’ No. 288 (October 2026), the municipal magazine of Magny-les-Hameaux (Yvelines, France).
The print, in real life
This is Broken shadow, print 2/20, at its owner’s home: a Medium print (40 × 60 cm) on Aluminium Dibond, in a white floater frame. It comes with its certificate of authenticity, which carries the edition number and a hologram that is also affixed to the back of the print.
Broken shadow, print 2/20, private collection40 × 60 cm · Aluminium Dibond · Floater frame · White
