Borrowing its name from an American Christian sect he came across when travelling in the states, referring to people being invited into the mountains to survive the end of the world after a flood, Carl De Keyzer’s Higher Ground is a fictional imagining of a possible future of sea-level rises. He also broaches the subject of migration.

It is the second instalment of a two-book project on climate change with nature becoming a potential danger. Higher Ground is a sequel to his other fiction-based book Moments Before the Flood, for which he traveled the entire European coastline to document the yet-unharmed historic European coastal landscape before the arrival of the flood.

Every day for six months, Carl De Keyzer made around six cable car trips going as far as 4000m.


“In Higher Ground I imagine a new Europe after the flood. Europeans migrate to the mountains of Europe and create a new mixed society.
What you see in the images are people near remote hotels, closed ski stations, half melted glaciers, … It’s what is left behind after the winter tourist season. Summer was ideal to work with this ‘fiction’ idea. In winter too many tourists in colorful suits and ski’s populate these areas. It didn’t work.”
- Carl De Keyzer

The book presents De Keyzer’s photographs alongside the fictional text of writer Philippe Claudel. “He perfectly describes the emotions and possible thoughts of people who have to abandon their homes and move to unknown higher territory,” says De Keyzer. “He speaks of drama also, things that I couldn’t photograph. A lot of inevitable shortcomings and gaps because of the limitation of fiction documentary photography – without staging – were filled with his writings.”