At the end of the 1950s, the World Health Organization asked him to find images on the eye and its diseases. Thus Bouvier discovered, "through the chances of life", his profession of "image searcher," which perhaps appealed to him because "images, like music, speak a universal language," as suggested by Pierre Starobinski in his preface to "Le Corps, miroir du Monde - voyage dans le musée imaginaire de Nicolas Bouvier". Another posthumous work, "Entre errance et éternité", offers a poetic look at the mountains of the world. The iconographer commented on some of his finds in a series of articles for "Le Temps stratégique", collected together as "Histoires d'une image".