Judith Bellavance collects collections. Vases, hangers, words, cut flowers, fragments of dead insects, and more. Photography, she says, lets her reduce the physical space that these accumulations occupy. It’s a gesture that may anticipate the imperative of loss, a response to the ineluctable disappearances that punctuate our lives. Indeed, loss and disappearance have been recurrent themes in Bellavance’s work for fifteen years. We might be tempted to attach the term “documentary” to her photographic practice, but we quickly realize that her images are more about creating narrative. She observes attentively, selects meticulously, stages carefully, juxtaposes elegantly, and retouches subtly to create fictions that she conceives of as “scripts of loss.” This strategy is notable in her video installation Pierres blanches (2023), her book Choisir (2021), and her series Un corps pour Hope (2018).