Chaumont-Photograph-sur-Loire: Wild at Coronary heart — Blind Journal – Imexplorer

Gazing skyward, she watches a leaf detach from its department and, slowly, float, whirl, and zigzag, tossed about by the wind, earlier than it lastly rests on the bottom. Loredana Nemes, who has captured the leaf’s journey, appears to be like up beaming.

She is likely one of the six photographers featured on this sixth version of the images competition on the Chaumont-Photograph-sur-Loire property. Overlooking the Loire River, the château’s inside courtyard is accessed through an outdated picket drawbridge spanning the moat. A small door, hidden behind an exterior hall flanked by Roman columns, takes us to the primary exhibition corridor through a large spiral staircase.

Timeless visions

Eric Poitevin’s images, alternating between small and huge codecs, B&W and shade, transitions from vast photographs of the underbrush close to his dwelling to closeups of vegetation some may dismiss as weeds. Simply as he performs with the areas between timber, this Meurthe-en-Moselle native makes use of the exhibition house and structure to boost his images.

His underbrush landscapes, printed and displayed in outsized codecs, create an immersive expertise. The white partitions of the château fade away, giving approach to a tangle of timber, fallen branches, and ground-level vegetation in shades of inexperienced, ochre, and brown. These visions stand exterior of time and transport us to the forests of the artist’s childhood.

To distinction with the cluttered underbrush, the artist creates portraits of grasses and low-lying vegetation in opposition to a white backdrop. These lovely parts, usually missed by nature lovers and hikers, are captured in Poitevin’s devoted, delicate, and timeless representations.

Ljubodrag Andric’s images additionally transcend temporality. Eschewing foliage and shrubs, he focuses on mineral landscapes. The feel of the partitions of the princess’s bed room resonates with the partitions of the buildings in India portrayed within the large-format photos on show. These deserted buildings, remnants of a forgotten previous, are an affidavit to the artist’s quest for “intimacy in monumentality.”

Dropping any sense of time, the artist spends hours ready for the proper mild so as to add depth to his topics: “The light gets better with pollution which makes it more diffuse,” he explains, including that he should “kill the light to better recreate it.”

Straddling images and portray, Andric’s rocky landscapes depart behind nature and vegetation to concentrate on human landscapes, all straight traces and crumbling partitions. These compositions, unaltered in enhancing and processing, stop the attention from “straying outside the frame, away from what we are looking at.”

The character of science

Since all issues in nature should begin someplace, Thierry Ardouin is fascinated by seeds. His mission was impressed by the invention of a catalog classifying seeds into “legal” and “illegal,” with 95% being hybrid seeds (ensuing from the crossbreeding of two distinct seeds), adopted by the invention of a casual community for promoting “illegal” seeds. Motivated by these findings, Ardouin launched into making a photographic catalog of seeds from world wide.

Since 2009, these portraits have revealed “the beauty of seeds, their shapes and colors.” Ardouin additionally describes their “usefulness,” which frequently is dependent upon their morphology. Working with Gilles Clément, who theorized the idea of planetary backyard in 1992, Ardouin has given an encyclopedic dimension to his mission. 

Nicolas Floc’h, alternatively, paperwork the underwater forests alongside the Brittany coast: “For many photographers, this is an non-subject. Underwater photography,” Floc’h explains, “typically features animals, athletes, or sunken relics. Vegetation is rarely depicted.” The artist is drawing up a survey of marine landscapes and compiling a typology of algae alongside the French coast.

Setting apart shade, which he considers incidental, Floc’h focuses on black-and-white images, believing it aligns extra intently with actuality. “With depth, colors blend together and become uniform, turning into shades of blue and green depending on the sea.” By staying “at the edge of the forest,” he provides a pure documentation of those landscapes by means of a wide-angle lens.

In a collection titled Initium Maris, the artist completely captures the coasts of Brittany, revealing what lies under our line of sight. This mission is all of the extra very important within the face of air pollution and local weather change, which threaten the existence of those aquatic forests as a lot as they endanger tropical sea corals.

Pure poetry

On the bottom flooring of the château, between the previous eating room and an antique-styled salon, are displayed the images of Korean artist Bae Bien-U. His artwork displays a serious concern of the Korean individuals: residing in concord with nature. Avoiding any traces of human exercise, he focuses on landscapes framed by sky and mountains, with clouds and fields dovetailing into each other within the distant mist.

“These pines made me feel the sacredness of life, but in a different way than the gentle curves of the Korean pines in Gyeongju. Firmly rooted in the ground, like parasols, they possess a unique charm: a rugged, resilient feel. As the sun set, the sea transformed, and the pines embroidered the sky… I could never get bored photographic this landscape: each day was more thrilling than the last,” explains the artist in his ebook Et les pins brodaient le ciel [And the Pines Embroidered the Sky], printed in January 2018 by Arnaud Bizalion.

The exhibition concludes in a small, stone outbuilding, which showcases Loredana Nemes’s black-and-white oeuvre. Conceived as a tribute “to the cycle of life” (the life and demise of timber, seasons, and so forth.), the collection Graubaum und Himmelmeer [Gray Trees and Celestial Sea] “exists only thanks to the silence of winter, the rustling of spring, the brilliance of summer, and the colors of autumn.”

As a toddler, Nemes fled her native Romania together with her mother and father for Germany. It was there, on the island of Rügen (the nation’s largest), that she encountered a forest that sparked a fascination. A number of return visits had been wanted for her to grasp the supply of her love for this island: “the beech trees of Rügen are exactly the same as those of my childhood, when I played outdoors with my friends.”

The collection encapsulates her love for nature, vegetation, and landscapes. It’s a ardour Nemes shares with the opposite photographers of this version of Chaumont-Photograph-sur-Loire, which turns into evident when a withered, shriveled leaf, reddened by autumn, detaches from its department to her utter delight.

Chaumont-Photograph-sur-Loire, November 18 to February 24, 2024