Joël Denot, exhausted by the ever-increasing proliferation of images conveyed by the new media, returns to the beginnings of the history of photography, its long exposure times and the hazards they engender. Exposure time - The first of the temporalities that Joël Denot's photographs confront is exposure time, which conditions the impression of light variations on the sensitive plate, transforming them into matter. The exposure time is the very tool of his work: all his photographs are entirely taken at the time of shooting, without any subsequent modification, without any digital intervention, and it is the opening times, generally very long, that determine the appearance or disappearance of the subject, the intensity of the color, the greater or lesser dilution of the colored atmosphere. These durations are the result of complex calculations, noted day by day according to light readings, from which precise exposure times are derived, just as the masks used to create the light impacts by burning the negative are precisely traced - the extreme technicality that makes his work so specific. Joël Denot extends their gesture, all the more so as his process is also reduced to something very simple, almost primitive: a pinhole, i.e. a box with a simple pinhole on one side and a sensitive plate on the other. . A light trap, like Niépce's chambre photographique, like the original camera obscura. Joël Denot paints with light.