W H I T E H E A T - °2025
“about loss, when everything turns white hot”
In the photographic series White Heat, Paul D’Haese confronts us with images that resist immediate interpretation. His aesthetic of overexposure, isolation, and stillness provides no storyline, no narrative anchor. Instead, he challenges the viewer to a philosophical reflection on visibility, materiality, and the disappearance of human presence in the world we ourselves have constructed.
Following Maurice Merleau‑Ponty, D’Haese’s images can be read as phenomenological objects. They are not mere representations, but experiences. The white, which in photographic terms often symbolizes overexposure or emptiness, here functions as a philosophical boundary: the point at which meaning ceases to act as information and becomes absence. D’Haese invites us to look at what withdraws from sight precisely through its excessive visibility. When the world becomes “white heat,” as the title suggests, it does not glow with life, but burns through to the bare bones of its structure.
According to Immanuel Kant and later Jean‑François Lyotard, the sublime is that which overwhelms our imagination. In White Heat, D’Haese shows no natural disaster or monumental architecture, but walls, fences, pipes, and concrete emptiness. These objects are banal artifacts of modernity, yet their disorienting isolation elevates them to a form of visual violence. They force the viewer to pause, to contemplate. They are too empty to be meaningful and too present to be ignored. In this paradox resides the sublime: the unspeakable within the everyday.
Martin Heidegger describes how modern technology alienates us from Being itself. Instead of the world as an openness where we belong, it becomes a warehouse of useful things. White Heat seems to extend this diagnosis. The photographed objects are no longer useful; they are remnants. They have decayed into 'thing-being': present, but detached from any function. In their silent existence, they reveal an abandoned world, where humans are absent but their traces remain as echoes of intentional order.
D’Haese’s work aligns with posthumanist thought in which humans are no longer the center of meaning. His photographs show a world that is not directed at humans, but has become itself. The perspective is often flat, without hierarchy. What is visible seems no longer intended for us. This raises the question: what does it mean to look at a world that no longer revolves around us? White Heat functions as a visual answer: listening to a new order, in which things speak — without needing us.
Jacques Derrida’s idea of “hauntology” describes a temporal sense in which the future no longer visits us and the past continues to haunt us. D’Haese’s images are permeated by this ghostly feeling. They show no ruins of a bygone glory, but structures of modernity that have stalled. What we see are remnants of a promise never fulfilled. The white heat that pervades everything is not the fiery energy of progress, but the residue of runaway light: a future that has burnt itself out.
Within this context, the title White Heat acquires an ecological dimension. The white heat is not only metaphysical or technological but also literal: planetary warming, melting glaciers, bleaching coral reefs, and parched soils of drought-stricken farmlands. The overexposed photographs resonate with a thermally overloaded world. The stillness D’Haese depicts reminds us of landscapes after a catastrophe, where human activity is not only absent but responsible for life itself coming to a halt. His work reflects a climate reality in which the consequences of human presence are visible only as destruction and overheating.
In this sense, White Heat aligns with ecophilosophers like Timothy Morton, who speaks of “hyperobjects”—phenomena so large-scale that they escape direct experience, such as climate change. D’Haese’s photographs visualize the intangible: the atmosphere of a world changing before our eyes yet never fully graspable. The white heat is a sensory symptom of a hyperobject: too vast, too slow, and too ubiquitous to capture in a single image, yet present in every pixel. Bruno Latour’s insight that nature no longer exists outside society but is fully intertwined with our political and technological structures also resonates in D’Haese’s work. His photographs show no nature opposite to culture, but a post-industrial zone where every boundary has blurred. The Earth responds, not with a voice, but with white light and silent objects.
White Heat is no documentary, no indictment, no nostalgic look back. It is a philosophical space where the image thinks. The white is not emptiness, but a focal point where meaning evaporates. D’Haese does not show us a world after humans, but one in which humans are already slowly dissolving. His work invites a new way of seeing: not to understand but to endure what we cannot contain. In this sense, White Heat is not merely photography but existential cartography—a map of humanity’s vanishing point.