Officials of the French Army of the Orient in the wardroom of a tugboat in Varna, Bulgaria, 1918

In this collection of photographs taken by French soldiers on the eastern front during World War I – over one hundred years ago – high resolution scans have revealed in stunning detail, not only the film’s grain structure, but also a rich patina of scratches and chemical alterations. On certain occasions, the intimate history of the negative itself and the successive layers of the passage of time confer to the work a unique level of abstract artistic beauty.