Aller-Retour

Aller-Retour is Eric Tabuchi and Nelly Monnier's account of making Atlas des Régions Naturelles, told from the road in 120 photographs and 120 short texts.

The title drops a letter from the atlas's acronym: AR is ARN without the N. The book takes the form of a travel journal. Each photograph is paired with a text, and the pairs run in sequence through kilometres, seasons, buildings, tiredness, chance meetings and doubts. The writing moves between the work and the life around it, and takes in travel, working as a couple, the state of France and the colour of the sky. The text is in French. Poursuite Éditions published the book in 2025 as a 128-page softcover, 14.5 by 21 centimetres, with a silkscreen-printed cover and rounded corners. The publisher's current listing is the second printing, dated October 2025.

The atlas began in 2017 and surveys France's roughly 450 historical "natural regions" in a fixed frontal style that leaves its two authors out of the picture. Aller-Retour puts them back in. The library holds all eight large-format volumes of the atlas, and this is the book that says how they were made.