Until now, French geographers have rarely questioned their intellectual and disciplinary relationship with fieldwork. Using the image of the “Arlesian woman”, a French cliché of simultaneous presence and absence, the author develops the hypothesis of a collective “fiction”, always evoked but almost never clarified. The paper presents successive analytical levels to assess the disciplinary issues stemming from a reflexive approach of the “field” as research object. Three specific approaches have been chosen: first, the place and status of “fieldwork” in the academic usage and in the epistemological analyses of the discipline, then the complex relationships between scientific and literary ways of writing (the geographer as an author), and last the consequences of the dominance of visualization in the relationship between geographers and their fields. To conclude, the paper invites us to collectively appropriate a reflexion on “fieldwork”, when digital technologies are deeply modifying the codes of representation, particularly for visual representation.