SETE#22 RESIDENCY
PhotosThe Colour of Feelings
It is so easy to talk of black-and-white photography that it is almost a misnomer. You only need to look at the catalogue of the exhibition dedicated to this theme, organised at the Grand Palais with the rich collections of the Bibliothèque nationale de France (which sadly could not open its doors to the public due to the pandemic, but which will open later on on the institution’s premises), to know how the term may be used for radically different approaches, aesthetics and “colours”.
Héloïse Conesa, one of the curators of this exhibition, wrote a piece precisely entitled “Black and white or the aesthetics of distance” for this catalogue. Distantiation from time, from space and therefore from the world. Transposing the familiar world we live in and doing away with its hues is undeniably a distantiation and a questioning of the whole illusion of “faithfulness” in representation, which has rooted collective credulity in a “truth” of photography – with the complicity of photographers, but this is finally well and truly over. Whatever the aesthetic choices, this is a form of abstraction – and there lies one of the strengths and ambiguities of photography – that does not in any way challenge a form of realism that reminds us that its very existence depends upon what preceded it in reality and which it first gives us an interpretation of.
Since photographers “write with light”, even in black and white, places like Sète, where light intensity is usually strong and where shadows are clearly marked, make for generally contrasted images. What is striking about Gabrielle Duplantier’s project – and even if her Sète harvest is a little more contrasted than the images from her south-western one – is the subtlety of the chromatic range she has developed. There are not only nuanced, gradual, vibrant and often sensual greys, on skins as much as in nature, but also a depth of the details in the blacks and supple modulations in the rare almost pure whites. This rich processing creates an atmosphere that leads us to gentle encounters, harmonious perspectives, with a lack of pre-established construction that sometimes borders on strange.
Restive towards the urban environment – cities are for her an impossibility – Gabrielle Duplantier has found in Sète a space to suit her. This is a space she can explore on foot, at her own pace, scanning the lights, having – and taking – time for encounters. Be it a little girl, a teenage couple, children whose beauty stops her in her track, a doll-like young woman in the street, an African woman of great beauty, but also a dog spotted against a dilapidated wall, a structure hanging over a pond, a cactus, a tree with sculptural grey branches or even the vibrating sea, this stroll beckons us to a colour chart of greys, from the deepest to the lightest. For the aim is not to describe, to explain or to make known, but only to share the shaped echo of joyful surprises, of moving and arresting incidents.
Faithful to a form of craftsmanship as much as to film photography, which gives a unique texture that she works on until she obtains an interpretation – which could be different another time and which she always doubts, Gabrielle Duplantier creates a world that is not just “her” subjective Sète but rather a poetic catalogue, not too organised, of the sensations she felt in a land unknown to her, bathed in lights that are not those that she usually It is with apparent ease and obvious freedom, with no explicit purpose, no structured intent that she moves through this land, that she interprets it like a little tune, by night, by day, any time of day, modulating the distances, to people and spaces alike, working most of all on the texture of the picture. A truly photographic texture that, in frames that are never forced, can easily inject a calm breath, only punctuated with just a few depths of absolute black and a few shrills of white. In order to give full scope to With Gabrielle Duplantier, black has the colour of feelings.
Christian caujolle
It is so easy to talk of black-and-white photography that it is almost a misnomer. You only need to look at the catalogue of the exhibition dedicated to this theme, organised at the Grand Palais with the rich collections of the Bibliothèque nationale de France (which sadly could not open its doors to the public due to the pandemic, but which will open later on on the institution’s premises), to know how the term may be used for radically different approaches, aesthetics and “colours”.
Héloïse Conesa, one of the curators of this exhibition, wrote a piece precisely entitled “Black and white or the aesthetics of distance” for this catalogue. Distantiation from time, from space and therefore from the world. Transposing the familiar world we live in and doing away with its hues is undeniably a distantiation and a questioning of the whole illusion of “faithfulness” in representation, which has rooted collective credulity in a “truth” of photography – with the complicity of photographers, but this is finally well and truly over. Whatever the aesthetic choices, this is a form of abstraction – and there lies one of the strengths and ambiguities of photography – that does not in any way challenge a form of realism that reminds us that its very existence depends upon what preceded it in reality and which it first gives us an interpretation of.
Since photographers “write with light”, even in black and white, places like Sète, where light intensity is usually strong and where shadows are clearly marked, make for generally contrasted images. What is striking about Gabrielle Duplantier’s project – and even if her Sète harvest is a little more contrasted than the images from her south-western one – is the subtlety of the chromatic range she has developed. There are not only nuanced, gradual, vibrant and often sensual greys, on skins as much as in nature, but also a depth of the details in the blacks and supple modulations in the rare almost pure whites. This rich processing creates an atmosphere that leads us to gentle encounters, harmonious perspectives, with a lack of pre-established construction that sometimes borders on strange.
Restive towards the urban environment – cities are for her an impossibility – Gabrielle Duplantier has found in Sète a space to suit her. This is a space she can explore on foot, at her own pace, scanning the lights, having – and taking – time for encounters. Be it a little girl, a teenage couple, children whose beauty stops her in her track, a doll-like young woman in the street, an African woman of great beauty, but also a dog spotted against a dilapidated wall, a structure hanging over a pond, a cactus, a tree with sculptural grey branches or even the vibrating sea, this stroll beckons us to a colour chart of greys, from the deepest to the lightest. For the aim is not to describe, to explain or to make known, but only to share the shaped echo of joyful surprises, of moving and arresting incidents.
Faithful to a form of craftsmanship as much as to film photography, which gives a unique texture that she works on until she obtains an interpretation – which could be different another time and which she always doubts, Gabrielle Duplantier creates a world that is not just “her” subjective Sète but rather a poetic catalogue, not too organised, of the sensations she felt in a land unknown to her, bathed in lights that are not those that she usually It is with apparent ease and obvious freedom, with no explicit purpose, no structured intent that she moves through this land, that she interprets it like a little tune, by night, by day, any time of day, modulating the distances, to people and spaces alike, working most of all on the texture of the picture. A truly photographic texture that, in frames that are never forced, can easily inject a calm breath, only punctuated with just a few depths of absolute black and a few shrills of white. In order to give full scope to With Gabrielle Duplantier, black has the colour of feelings.
Christian caujolle