In the 1990s, the landscape becomes a focal point for government policy on town and country planning. With the 1993 Landscape Law and then the European Landscape Convention in 2000, the landscape is considered a heritage to be protected. As concern about the environment grows, accompanied by a certain loss of orientation, the approach to the territory becomes protective. At times, photography even seems to stray from its initial documentary vocation to concentrate on aesthetic issues. Landscapes, considered as actual monuments, thus enter the pantheon of remarkable sites, thanks in part to photography. Mission du Conservatoire du Littoral (The Mission for the Preservation of the Coast), for example, celebrates the beauty of the spaces protected by this institution since 1975. Along with major construction projects, like those of "the Mitterrand years," which modify the Paris skyline, or the Channel Tunnel, the "construction project of the century," documented by the Mission photographique transmanche (Cross Channel Photographic Mission) for some twenty years, the great landscapes evolve. Over a year or over a decade, photography bears witness to changes in the territory, at the scale of the neighborhood as at the regional level—changes followed, for example, via a project like "Trwa Kartié" on Reunion Island or the Mission Euroméditerranée (Euro-Mediterranean Mission) in Marseille.

Likewise, such is the purpose of the Observatoire photographique national du paysage (National Photographic Observatory of the Landscape), which records for each point on a pre-defined itinerary, the different phases of the evolution of a site. The series presupposes systematic return to different sites, always at the same place, with the same framing, throughout the seasons and over the years. The poetic, spell-binding dimension that emerges from certain series helps to transform what might have been merely a documentary archive into a work of art.
Having long been a source of fascination for its capacity to capture the moment, photography now takes on a language for describing over time. An aesthetic of the ordinary imposes itself, articulating a prosaic practice of photography with attention focused on landscapes usually left out of range. This reversal in point of view, already evident in the images of Mission photographique de la DATAR (the DATAR Photographic Mission), is as unexpected as it is remarkable. The undeniably aesthetic quality of most of the works reveals that these two approaches, from the sublime to the commonplace, are considerably less oppositional than one would have first imagined.