Figures d'un monde en sursis (Figures of a world on borrowed time) sets out to link Matthias Koch's photographs with Claude Molzino's philosophical analysis of them. This "time of the present" as perceived by the photographer's eye is in fact a set of snapshots of the "time of the end" that could be our era. In addition to the nuclearization of the world and the risk it represents for humankind, the over-exploitation of the planet poses an unprecedented threat to the living world.

After reflecting on the specificities of photographic art, the value of "black and white" and photography's relationship with time and reality, Claude Molzino draws primarily on the theses of Roland Barthes, Martin Heidegger and Günther Anders to demonstrate the usefulness of photographic art. Under the philosopher's pen, the latter is aptly seen as a revelation to man of his reprieve, in other words, as a means of alerting him to his responsibility for his own disappearance. At the risk of devastation and annihilation, beyond the historical episode of Hiroshima presented as the prelude to this new "era of humanicide", never, according to Claude Molzino, has "being [been so much] under the threat of non-being".