Hugo Perez’s Chaos: In Praise of Falling
- Pierre-Gaël Pasquiou
- Mar 4
- 3 min read
Self-taught photographer, purebred city climber, and a perpetually “in-transition” lawyer, Hugo Perez has made a habit of turning climbing’s failures into something worth staring at. Chaos is his latest photo project: a close-up, personal notebook where skin splits, bodies hit the ground, and poetry shows up—happily—right in the mess.
Climbing is usually sold as an airy dance between holds. Perez is clearly more into the sketchier version: the one where you hesitate, slip, swear, and end up with wrecked fingers and an ego in pieces. With Chaos, this 29-year-old Parisian puts his finger on what’s most moving about climbing: how it can leave you exposed. And honestly, it’s beautiful.
The good mess of failure
Fifteen years grinding away on the plastic in Paris gyms will sharpen your eye like a razor-thin crimp. Perez came up with that first wave of gym-raised urban climbers. “I was climbing almost every day around Antrebloc,” he tells us, with the easy calm of someone who wore out resin holds before it was cool.
Pretty quickly, like a lot of people on that track, he got pulled toward the “sacred forest”: Fontainebleau—the bouldering mecca where you learn to fall hard as often as you learn to move well. No federation certificate, no formal coaching. Perez owns that DIY split without making a big deal of it. “I didn’t turn it into a job, and I wasn’t really trying to,” he says—more interested in working a flash than clipping carabiners.
A photo book—without the polish
The project started with a public photography class offered by the City of Paris. The assignment: make a photo book. Perez didn’t take long to decide. It would be climbing—but the rebellious version.
“I was tired of the overly polished Fontainebleau shots. Sometimes it feels like you’re going in circles,” he says flatly. Instead of chasing perfect movement and squeaky-clean boulders, he points his flash at what usually gets edited out: the repeated failures, the bleeding fingertips, the tight smiles after the tenth fall. “Most of the time, we show the final photo—the nice move, done perfectly. But failure? We don’t really show that,” he explains. And yet, he insists, “they’re still good moments.” Someone had to say it.
Blur as a choice: when the photographer loses his footing
With an unapologetic mix of blur and flash, Perez isn’t trying to gently unsettle you—he wants to knock you off-balance. Where classic climbing photos turn bodies into graceful shapes floating in clean air, Chaos draws different lines: the line of the fall, the uncontrolled skid, the openly owned wipeout.
“It was about breaking the lines, creating new ones—especially the lines of the fall,” he says. The approach calls to mind American photographer Chad Moore, known for leaning into blur, raw grain, and the kind of rough-edged poetry that comes straight from real life. Perez builds a joyful choreography where bodies stall out, wobble, and slam down without shame—an ode to gravity, literally and otherwise.
A geological—and existential—poetry
With the title Chaos, Perez isn’t just going for a provocative vibe. He’s also slipping in a small geology lesson. In the Fontainebleau area, “chaos” can refer to a natural, jumbled pile of boulders—common in places like the Apremont gorges. It’s a fitting image for the way bouldering can feel: a joyful mess.
But Perez, committed to the idea, pushes it further. His “chaos” turns metaphorical, even existential: the stubborn, absurd fight of a climber against a piece of rock that refuses to be “conquered.” In a single flash, a plain old fall starts to look almost philosophical.
What’s next: cliffs—and women in the frame
Chaos is already a strong first chapter, but Perez wants more. He’s quick to name what’s missing—“There aren’t any women, for example”—and he wants to widen the project toward outdoor cliffs. Friends even gave him a rope specifically so he can spend hours hanging in space, shooting from the wall. The long-term goal: turn Chaos into a more ambitious book, open to more kinds of climbers, able to speak to a broader audience. In the meantime, he hopes to exhibit the photos in Paris gyms—bringing a little poetry into these modern temples where, too often, only success gets the spotlight.
With Chaos, Hugo Perez isn’t just showing the “behind the scenes” of climbing. He celebrates it—with real, giddy swagger. By fully embracing imperfection, he reminds us that climbing, like life, is often a story of beautiful failures and modest wins. With Perez, the chaos starts to look downright appealing. You almost find yourself wanting to fall more often.
