Jonk travels the world looking for abandoned places.

Today, he has visited more than one thousand and five hundreds of them in around fifty countries on four continents.

With time, his interest focuses on what appears to him to be the strongest in this vast subject of abandonment: Nature taking over. It is poetic, even magic, to see this Nature retaking what used to be hers, reintegrating through broken windows, cracks on the walls, spaces built by Man and then neglected, until sometimes guzzling them up entirely.

This topic naturally imposed itself to him due to the ecologic consciousness that moves him since his youngest age and to the strength of the message it carries. The series of this work is called Naturalia: Chronicle of Contemporary Ruins. It asks a fundamental question: that of the place of Man on Earth and his relationship with Nature. Far from being pessimistic, and at a time when Man’s domination of Nature has never been so extreme, it aims to wake our consciousness. Nature is stronger, and whatever happens to Man, She will always be there.

Man builds, Man abandons. Every time for his own peculiar reasons. Nature does not care about those reasons. But one thing is certain, when Man leaves, She comes back and takes back everything.

In his poem Eternity of Nature, brevity of Man, Alphonse de Lamartine writes “Triumph, immortal Nature! / Whose hand full of days / Lends unlimited strengths / Times that always rise again!” In her inexorable progression, She starts reclaiming the outsides of an Italian villa before infiltrating the insides of a Croatian castle or a Belgian greenhouse. Then, She grows in the atrium of a Polish palace, in a Hungarian train station or a Cuban theater before invading a Montenegrin castle. Then, She guzzles the cross of a Belgian monastery or given more time, imprisons a Taiwanese mansion with her strong roots.

The next steps? Collapse and burial.

French poet Léo Ferré said “With Time goes, everything goes”. So, when Nature and Time will have taken back what Man abandons, what will be left of our civilization?

In March 2018, he releases the book Naturalia on the topic. Three months later, at age 33, he quits his job in the finance to fully dedicate himself to this project. With this series, as a photographer Jonk tries to humbly contribute to make people aware of the critical ecological situation we are all in.

In April 2021, his publishing house Jonk Editions newly created publishes the volume II for which Yann Arthus-Bertrand wrote the preface.