Festival La Gacilly: Australia & Beyond

For over 20 years, the La Gacilly Photo Festival has been a key contributor to the vitality of a rural community. It is now recognised as a major event by the Morbihan Council. This 21st edition stays consistent with its editorial focus and showcases a diversity of photographic visions.

The Festival is spearheaded by a team of passionate individuals, with invaluable support from volunteers and backing from public and private partners. It is a unifying force that brings together photographers, various stakeholders, and the community around a set of shared values.

Photography is an art to be shared, as proven each year by the 300,000 festival-goers who come to admire the talent of the photographers and their works on display along the narrow lanes and streets and in the gardens of our village.

What sets the La Gacilly Photo Festival apart is not only that it highlights social and environmental issues, but also the fact that it is rooted in a close-knit, welcoming community. This year, we are also celebrating the seventh year of the La Gacilly-Baden Photo Festival, a sign of our efforts to give our event international reach.

In the name of all the members of our association, I would like to express my gratitude for the dedication and commitment demonstrated by everyone involved in this remarkable project.
Jacques Rocher President and Founder of the La Gacilly Photo Festival

Australia

BOBBI LOCKYER: Origins (Australia b. 1986)
Bobbi Lockyer is, in her own words, a pink-haired mermaid queen, feminist, queer and passionate about colour, working to shake up traditional social circles with her art. An art she creates using clothing, traditional works (material and digital), paintings… and photographs.

Born in Port Hedland in Kariyarra country, she is a representative of the Ngarluma, Kariyarra, Nyul Nyul and Yawuru peoples. Honoured as a NAIDOC Artist Celebrating Aboriginal Culture in 2021 and an Ambassador for Nikon Australia, Bobbi Lockyer draws inspiration from ancestral tales, the vibrant hues of her natural environment, the waves of the ocean and her deep commitment to her community, using all this to fuel an artistic approach that defies convention.

She offers a glimpse into the intimate through her work, which also serves as a platform to advocate for causes close to her heart, such as social justice, the rights of indigenous peoples and women’s rights, including Birthing on Country: a movement that helps Aboriginal women give birth in a familiar environment that respects their traditions and identity. This concept also affirms that the child is born on the sovereign lands of Australia’s first peoples, peoples who have never ceded ownership of their lands, seas and skies to anyone else. These notions of motherhood, transmission and natural heritage hold great importance for this artist, who is well aware that the survival of the first peoples depends on the preservation of their ancestral rites.

This is also a necessary struggle: in 2023, after a historic referendum, Australia voted “No” to constitutional recognition of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the original inhabitants of the island-continent. A failure at the end of a campaign that further deepened the racial divisions in the country.
www.bobbilockyer.com


ADAM FERGUSON: Big Sky (Australia b. 1978)
In 1979, photographer Richard Avedon started to spend his summers roaming the American West, taking portraits of the people who lived there. This work was exhibited in 1985 and helped to debunk the myths of the American Wild West, forged by post-Civil War literature, music and film, which romanticised a dangerous world populated by “savages”.

Australian photographer Adam Ferguson, who returned to his native country after covering conflicts (in Afghanistan, among other places), wanted to emulate exactly this approach in his Big Sky series. The title evokes the very particular ambience in the vast, sparsely populated Australian territory: “There’s kind of an eerie quietness to it,” he warns. “And the expanse of sky becomes incredibly loud and poignant.” His aim was to explore the complex interplay between Australia’s colonial history and the current climate crisis, globalisation and contemporary daily life in the country’s rural expanses.

“As Australians, integral to our national psyche is this notion of the bush and the farmer and the outback,” says Adam Ferguson. “And that’s been pretty pivotal in developing, at least, an Anglo national identity.” But in his view, this national narrative is far removed from reality. In particular, he mentions farming methods inherited from the English model, which do not fit the Australian ecosystem.

Of the view that no one had really photographed the interior of Australia in the way that Avedon had captured the American west, Ferguson set out to follow his predecessor’s lead and portray his homeland in a new light. And to recognise that these territories still belong to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples – the two indigenous groups of Australia. A form of respect: “We recognise that the sovereignty of this land has never been ceded and we pay tribute to the elders, past and present. It was, and always will be, Aboriginal land.”
adamfergusonstudio.com


MATTHEW ABBOTT: Fires and Counter-Fires (Australia b. 1984)
Between June 2019 and May 2020, the bushfire season in Australia was so violent that specialists dubbed it “Black Summer”. With 24.3 million hectares ravaged, more than 3,000 buildings destroyed, 88 billion Australian dollars in financial losses, 34 people killed and 3 billion terrestrial vertebrates killed, it was one of the greatest disasters in the country’s recent history.

Photographer Matthew Abbott captured the tragic event and won a World Press Photo award for his image of a kangaroo hopping past a burning house.

At the time, many members of the government tried to deny or ignore the link between climate change and the increase in the number and scale of fires. However, in an article published in the scientific journal Nature in 2021, a group of researchers demonstrate that fire activity in Australia is strongly influenced by high climate variability, and that climate change has the potential to further alter the dynamics of these fires.

Confronted with this reality, could the answer lie in the ancestral practices practised by the Aborigines since time immemorial? This indigenous people, whose culture is one of the oldest on the planet, has revived the ancient practice of burning to preserve and improve their native lands – and contribute to the development of their communities. These practices have been analysed and refined by scientists who now endorse them. At the start of the dry season, these men and women do not therefore fight fires. They start them, to maintain better control of the flames afterwards. As the number of forest fires continues to rise, fire is being reconsidered as a solution, and not just a problem.
@mattabbottphoto


VIVIANE DALLES: Terra Nullius (France b. 1978)
This Latin expression refers to a land unoccupied by any state, a “nobody’s land”. The principle of terra nullius emerged when the British colonised Australia, to justify their invasion of this island-continent, considering the indigenous people as an inferior race destined to become a just a small segment of the population, or indeed, to disappear altogether. On 28 April 1770, British explorer James Cook refused to recognise the indigenous populations. Two centuries later, in 1992, a legal battle over the recognition of Aboriginal land rights led the High Court of Australia to deliver a landmark judgement declaring that the country had never been terra nullius and invalidating this principle, with retroactive effect.

Today, Australia has a population of over 25 million. The vast majority live on the coast, in the big cities such as the capital Canberra, Sydney and Melbourne. Nearly 10% live in the heart of the country – the Bush and the Outback – covering more than two-thirds of the territory. Viviane Dalles, the French photographer who won the Canon Women’s Photojournalist Award, set out to understand how the sparse population of these deserted regions live, and spent several months in this vast wilderness.

Most of her story takes place in the Northern Territory. A place where time and distance stretch infinitely like the horizon. A few towns remain, such as Alice Springs, the gateway to the Red Centre. But Viviane Dalles left these places behind, instead taking to the dusty roads, where life gains a whole new dimension. Living on a vast farm, comparable in size to a French département, demands extraordinary self-reliance and mental strength. Here, far from everything, the children don’t go to school; instead, school comes to them via the internet and Skype. It’s an immensity that’s harsh yet magnificent, fierce yet radiant. Hostility that can be tamed… if you take the time.
www.vivianedalles.com


TRENT PARKE: Australia, Unfiltered (Australia b. 1971)
“For me, it’s all about emotional connection. I love this country, love the people, everything about it… I’m not really interested in any other country…”. Such is Trent Parke’s proclamation of love for his native Australia. He was born in Newcastle, a town in New South Wales, not its English counterpart. He got into photography at the age of 12, using his mother’s Pentax Spotmatic and turned the family laundry room into a makeshift darkroom. It’s a passion that has stayed with him ever since. He started out as a photojournalist, working for the press. He has since drawn on his Australian roots to produce documentaries, along with more intimate works on the borderline between fiction and reality, exploring themes of identity, territory and family life.

In 2007, he became the first photographer from the country to be admitted to the prestigious Magnum agency. Parke’s reputation stems from his ability to capture an authentic, unfiltered portrait of his homeland, which he documents from the rural outback to the largest coastal cities. For his book Minutes to Midnight, he travelled 90,000 kilometres across Australia with his partner Narelle Autio (also exhibiting at this year’s festival in La Gacilly). The result is a work that shows a nation in flux, uneasy with its identity and its place in the world, but also a work of fiction that depicts the construction and resurgence of an apocalyptic world..

In another of his series, Welcome to Nowhere, selected for this exhibition, the author has assembled ironic and often humorous glimpses of dusty hinterland towns, where the impact of human settlement on the landscape produces some absurd and often surreal scenes.
All About Trent Parke


NARELLE AUTIO: The Call of the Oceans (Australia b. 1969)
Australia is surrounded by three of the world’s five oceans: the Indian, Southern and Pacific. Few photographers have documented the interactions between humans and the oceans as subtly as Narelle Autio.

She has spent more than 20 years capturing instants in the water, all while fulfilling assignments for various newspapers and magazines she has worked for. Her Coastal Dwellers series earned her a first prize at the World Press Photo Awards and the Leica Oskar Barnack prize in 2002. She is best known for her study of the human body interacting with water, creating images that portray people seemingly transported and distorted by their underwater environment, caught in a cloud of air bubbles that give the scene a kind of surrealist abstraction.

Autio’s photographs highlight that feeling of fascination mixed with fear we feel when swimming – whether in the ocean or a pool. They illustrate our natural attraction to water, always juxtaposed with the profound vulnerability of humans in this element. In this respect, the water holes – enigmatic oases surrounded by deserts – embody a sublime contradiction for her: a place where opposing elements converge, where mystery and the promise of a new world come together beneath the surface. In these dark waters, everything merges: light and darkness, life and death, questions and unattainable answers.

The exhibition also features images produced by the artist during her travels across Australia, along dusty roads that seem to go nowhere, but ultimately lead to one of the three oceans bordering this island-continent.
agencevu.com/en/photographer/narelle-autio


ANNE ZAHALKA: Fragments of Wild Life (Australia b. 1957)
It’s hard to sum up Anne Zahalka’s forty-year career in a single exhibition. This artist’s work is held in the collections of the most prestigious museums in Melbourne, Victoria, Prague and Seoul. She made a name for herself on the Australian art scene with her eclectic series, which range from still life to hyper-realistic portraits and even scenes from the natural world. She says that main aim of her work is to explore cultural stereotypes and use humour to challenge them. She embraces the themes of identity, belonging, loss and the passing of time. Here, the focus is on her approach to the natural world.

In her latest work, Future Past Present Tense, for example, she revisits the notion of diorama: a panoramic painting on canvas, usually presented in darkened rooms to give the illusion of reality and movement through the play of light. Zahalka has dusted off these compositions, nowadays found in old museums, and inserted the original diorama makers – the scientists, illustrators and craftsmen who produced them – into the scenes. Inspired both by the naturalists of yesteryear and by fictional artists, she uses photography to draw attention to the drastic changes in Tasmanian ecosystems and the role of humans in the degradation, or preservation, of this environment. The animals she portrays are threatened by urbanisation, by the damaging effects of the climate, by our own folly.

In these images, exhibited for the first time in France, Zahalka constantly manipulates and exploits the past to better understand the present and thus perhaps provide insight into the future. Through them, we are encouraged to reflect on the ways in which we interact with the world – and the world we leave for future generations.
zahalkaworld.com.au


TAMARA DEAN: In Search of an Eden (Australia b. 1976)
In Australia, the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 was compounded by an earlier trauma: the devastating bushfires of “Black Summer”. Like many others, Tamara Dean’s life was transformed, disrupted and interrupted. To escape the anxieties induced during this troubled period, this artist, performer and photographer created a series of shots in various gardens, using her body as the “illuminated point” in the landscape. “I immersed my body in the frigid water, buried myself in crevices in the earth, and enveloped my body in blossoming flowers… and their industrious bees,” says Tamara Dean. “At the end of each day my body was marked with bruises, scratches and bites, yet I emerged from the experience re-energised by the intimate physical sensation of being alive.” “The figure you see moving through the landscape in these works is not just me but the woman I would like to be. She who can fly through the air, tumble through the treetops and climb trees.”

Tamara Dean’s signature style uses the body as a symbol. It is a tool used to break down the barriers separating humanity from its responsibility to the planet. Growing up near a nature reserve, she nurtured a strong passion for the Australian bush that continues to motivate her today. By placing humans at the centre of these wild frescoes, she returns them to their primal state – their status as a species surviving on a planet and an integral part of a sensitive ecosystem. “By becoming aware of this, we can start to see ourselves as part of something bigger, and no longer as the centre of the universe.”
All About Tamara Dean


ANOEK DE GROOT, SAEED KHAN, TORSTEN BLACKWOOD: Survivals (Australia)
More than 60,000 years after their settlement on the island-continent, the indigenous peoples continue to be marginalised on their own lands. Last October, a referendum was held, with the modest aim of creating an Aboriginal Voice – a mere advisory body to the government and parliament, with no decision-making powers. It was widely rejected by Australian voters. Proof that the country is far from having made peace with its colonial past, as historian Romain Fathi, from the University of Adelaide, explains: “What can you expect from a nation that still has the Union Jack on its flag and when its national holiday marks the day it was invaded by the British on 26 January 1788? They are afraid that the land they stole will be taken away from them.”

As a result, the Aborigines, who today represent 3.5% of the Australian population, are effectively second-class citizens: their life expectancy is almost ten years shorter than that of the rest of the population, and they consistently fall behind on all the economic indicators, from poverty to unemployment, and from poor housing to infant mortality.

The true strength of Agence France-Presse and its network of 450 photographers worldwide lies in their ability to shed light on news that may otherwise go unnoticed, sometimes showing what we would prefer not to see, combating preconceived ideas in the name of truth, telling stories about our changing societies, and catalysing emotions. And this holds true for the peoples of Oceania, and Australia in particular. Behind the picturesque folkloric images taken by photojournalists lurks a sad reality. The brutal truth can sometimes be summed up in a single photograph, like the one taken by Anoek de Groot capturing the forlorn gaze of a child living in squalor in an insalubrious camp in Alice Springs.


And Beyond

JOEL MEYEROWITZ: Through the Cities (United States b. 1938)
“For us (Europeans), a city means above all the past, for the Americans a city is mainly future; what they love in it is all that it may yet be.” That is what Jean-Paul Sartre had to say about the American city in the mid-20th century. With their distinctive and instantly recognisable urban grammar, those cities of the future hold a significant place in our collective unconscious, symbolising Western progress, the consumer society and the American dream.

Born in the world’s most iconic city, New Yorker Joel Meyerowitz is a pioneer of what we call “street photography”. He studied painting then embarked on a photography career in the 1960s. Inspired by another giant of American photography, Robert Frank, he produced his first series in black and white. However, he went on to become a pioneer of colour film, which he finally adopted in 1976 because, as he is fond of saying, “life is in colour”. This choice set him apart from many other artists who shunned this new photographic style, but it ultimately contributed to the success of his work.

This exhibition goes beyond a mere retrospective and instead embarks viewers on a journey through the transformation and diversification of the American cities that he has passed through over the years. From the tranquil evening vibe of a roadside diner sign to the chaotic energy of a New York intersection at rush hour, via the splendour of a Florida swimming pool… each image contributes to a stunning fresco that reveals the soul of a nation and its people. Joel Meyerowitz observes, frames, playfully brings out the detail, and transforms the ordinary into something extraordinary. A journey along linear streets where the light dances on the façades of the buildings, that soar skywards. And where passers-by become unwilling extras in this magnificent movie entitled America.
All About Joel Meyerowitz


LOUISE JOHNS: In the Vast Wild West (United States b. 1992)
Montana is big sky country, as the vehicle licence plates in this iconic state of the American West will tell you. The region’s vast wild expanses, often associated with the American pioneer spirit, are a symbol of freedom and adventure.

Montana is also the home of photographer Louise Johns, who settled in the heart of the countryside here after extensive travelling. She tells the story of efforts to restore bison populations on the plains in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem – an area of 90,000 square kilometres stretching from northern Wyoming through Idaho to southern Montana. With the reintroduction of bison, along with wolves and grizzly bears, farming communities are grappling with some major challenges. They are committed to the sustainable management of these lands and seek ways of sustaining their livelihood while preserving wildlife – and adapting to the growing pressures of development, tourism and leisure. From another perspective, the recovery of the bison is crucial to the cultural affirmation of the Amerindian tribes, who have had a life-sustaining relationship with this animal for over 10,000 years.

The bison has thus become a point of contention, pitting livestock ranchers, scientists, and tribes against one another, in a cultural clash over competing perspectives and agendas. In 2023, on the edge of Glacier National Park, the Blackfeet Nation became the first indigenous community to release wild bison on their ancestral lands. These complex issues are documented by Louise Johns, in photographs that are an ode to the Wild West, to a way of life passed down from the cowboys of yesteryear. Her images also provide valuable insights into the complicated and conflict-ridden relationships between the various groups living in this fabled territory.
www.louisejohnsphoto.com


ALESSANDRO CINQUE: SOILED EARTH, DAMAGED BODIES, Mining takes power in the Andean countries (Italia b. 1988)
Presented here to the public for the first time, this sensitive and committed exhibition is the culmination of several years’ work and trips to four Latin American countries. This incredible journey was made possible thanks to the generous support of the Terre Solidaire Photo Prize for humanist and environmental photography, awarded by CCFD-Terre Solidaire. The images chronicle the complex coexistence between the mining industry and the indigenous communities of the Andean territories.

It is an ambitious project by documentary photographer Alessandro Cinque (who lives in Lima), begun seven years ago in Peru, the world’s second-largest producer of copper and silver. Mining contributes twice as much to the Peruvian economy as tourism. But for the Andean communities, it plunders their wealth and their water sources, the lifeblood of their economy. Just a few kilometres from the Peruvian border are the two colossal undertakings that launched Ecuador’s large-scale mining operations. Among them is Mirador, the project that sparked indigenous protests in 2012. Further south, in Argentina, civil resistance has managed to delay two mining projects in the town of Andalgalá. Since 2010, not a Saturday goes by without local communities taking to the streets in protest. Last December, Bolivia inaugurated its first industrial- scale lithium plant in the Uyuni salt flats. Yet just three hours away, dozens of miners die every year searching for silver ore in the town of Potosí.

Peru, Ecuador, Argentina and Bolivia share a similar history of large-scale mining. In the style of the great Amerindian photographer Martín Chambi, using soft, low- contrast images that do not add drama to drama, this exhibition reveals the constant struggle between economic growth, the preservation of traditional ways of life, the safeguarding of natural areas and the dramatic consequences on the population’s health.
www.louisejohnsphoto.com


GEORGE STEINMETZ: Feed the Planet (United States b. 1957)
Where does your food come from? The rib steak, the chicken leg, the carrots and what about that innocent lettuce? Do you know how these foods end up on your plate? So many people in the West look no further than their supermarket aisles. And they often have no idea how the food is produced or where it comes from.

This exhibition, and the book it is based on, attempt to give a comprehensive answer to this question. Feed the Planet is the outcome of ten years’ work in the field, in 40 countries, across five oceans and on every continent on our planet. An unprecedented project meticulously undertaken by photojournalist George Steinmetz, known the world over for the quality of his aerial images and the precision of his shots; an extraordinary visual document illustrating the global food system relied on to feed the 8 billion people who live on our planet.

Beyond the demographics, there are many questions. Since the domestication of plants began around 11,000 years ago, humans have converted 40% of the Earth’s land mass into farmland – often to the detriment of biodiversity. In the oceans, more than half the fish biomass has disappeared since the 1950s. And we cannot overlook the fact that today’s agricultural systems account for 30% of global greenhouse gas emissions.

How do we accommodate these systems with the prospect of 2 billion more people on Earth by 2050? How can they be adapted to cope with rising protein consumption in emerging countries? If the world’s food supply needs to double in the next 30 years, how will this be achieved this without wiping out the few remaining wild spaces and creatures? Let’s never forget that, as consumers with the power to vote with our forks, it is our duty to ensure the fair utilisation of our resources. And that on a large scale, the decisions we all take can have a significant impact on market supply. And, ultimately, on the environment.
www.georgesteinmetz.com


MITCH DOBROWNER: In the Eyes of the Storm (United States b. 1956)
When we see a tornado, our reflex is to run for cover. Or to lock ourselves in our cellar. No so for Mitch Dobrowner, who heads straight for the storm. Where his fellow wildlife photographers track birds and mammals, he hunts down vortexes, storm supercells and other severe weather phenomena. “They take on so many different aspects, faces and personalities; I’m in awe watching them,” explains the photographer who first started taking pictures as a teenager, but later set his camera aside until 2005 while he raised his family. “It’s watching Mother Nature at her finest. My only hope is that my images do justice to these amazing phenomena of nature.”

It’s a passion that comes with an element of danger. Dobrowner is aware of the risks involved, but chooses to get as close as he can to the vortexes to further his understanding of these phenomena. In 2010, in Wyoming, he got caught in a hailstorm. “We were being chased by the storm – instead of us chasing after it.” The incident didn’t discourage him, as he has continued to track down the nastiest storms and weather conditions for almost two decades. “My job is to get to the right place at the right time, then let nature show itself,” he says. He has even been honoured by Google for his use of their technology in his weather quests.

His systematic use of black and white to accentuate the harshness of the storms stems from his admiration for Ansel Adams – another master of American landscape photography. An approach that won him the Iris d’Or at the Sony World Photography Awards in 2012. Despite his success and the esteem he has gained, Mitch Dobrowner refuses to be labelled a “storm chaser”: “I don’t like to put things in boxes. I’m just a landscape photographer.”
Alll About Mitch Dobrowner


ALICE PALLOT: The Perils of Nature (France b. 1995)
This year’s winner of the Leica Award for New Takes on Environmental Photography, introduced by the La Gacilly Photo Festival is a raw talent, a sensitive artist, concerned with clinical truth. As soon as she embarked on a course at the École nationale supérieure des arts visuels de La Cambre (ENSAV) in Brussels, Alice Pallot began exploring the complex relationship between humans and their constantly changing environment, raising questions that are inherently relevant to our times. In her visual experiments, she tends to reveal hidden realities by opening the doors of her imagination.

“Through [my images], I explore the influence of man and science on nature and the links that develop between them,” she explains. “I use this to create fictional universes, often through narration. I’m infusing new life into nature that’s dying out. When on my travels, I play with the natural elements that surround me. My approach is similar to that of a researcher: I document, explore, research and then go out into the field to develop my project. Applying a cold, phantasmagorical aesthetic, I draw the viewer into a parallel universe inspired by reality.”

The fruits of her reflections are powerfully apparent in her latest series, Algues Maudites. It brings to light and condemns the alarming spread of green algae on Brittany’s coasts. Attributed to high levels of nitrates and phosphates, the algae proliferate along the coastline and release toxins when they decay. In extreme concentration, this phenomenon leads to oxygen depletion, ecosystem imbalance and biodiversity loss. Similarly, in her Oasis series, the photographer reveals the absurdity of a cut flower market that celebrates beauty but causes unsuspected pollution.

Capturing the invisible in an often futuristic aesthetic and working with an unconventional colour palette, as though applying filters to our much-abused nature, Pallot’s works are a reminder of the fragility and unpredictability of our world, continually tested by human action.
alicepallot.com


ULLA LOHMANN: New Britain and the People of the Volcanoes, A culture at risk (Germany b. 1977)
Ten years ago, the province of East New Britain in Papua New Guinea was heavily forested. Over 98% of its primary forest was still intact. Now, however, increased logging – to clear land for oil palm plantations – has exacerbated the loss of forest cover. Before 2008, the area lost each year was around 3,600 hectares. But deforestation has increased exponentially over the last 20 years. Nearly 20,000 hectares are now sacrificed every year. In all, it is estimated that New Britain lost 10% of its tree cover between 2001 and 2020 – nearly 60% of which is considered to be primary forest.

Photographer Ulla Lohmann is well with New Britain, so named because the island was discovered in 1700 by British explorer William Dampier. She first went there in 2001, on her first trip to the region, and immediately fell in love with the landscapes, the volcanoes that dot the land, the people (Austronesians and Papuans) and the traditional cultures that subsist there. As part of a photographic commission from the Yves Rocher Foundation on the final sanctuaries of biodiversity, she returned there to document the upheavals weakening its ecosystem and endangering an ancestral way of life. “The diversity of life is evident everywhere you look, both on land, in the primary forests teeming with as yet unknown species, and underwater, with some of the richest coral reefs on the planet,” explains the German photographer.

The exhibition takes us on a thrilling adventure into the Nakanai mountains and to the majestic volcanoes of the Bismarck archipelago, offering a taste of far-off lands, worlds away from Brittany or Britain. Yet, the themes of nature preservation and environmental safeguarding are just as relevant there as they are in our regions.
ullalohmann.com


GAËL TURINE: The Spirits of the Forest (Belgium b. 1972)
Welcome to Benin, former kingdom of Dahomey and cradle of voodoo. In this territory found to the north of the Gulf of Guinea, wedged between Togo to the west and Nigeria to the east, the boundary between the living and the dead is more tenuous than the non-believer might assume.

So, what exactly is voodoo? A religion, just like Christianity and Islam – both of which are highly developed in the region. Its practitioners worship a pantheon of gods and minor deities who inhabit natural elements such as a stone, a waterfall… or a tree. It took time, patience and the authorisation of the country’s spiritual leaders for Gaël Turine, a sensitive social reporter, to gain access to the sacred forests of Mitogbodji, Fâ-Zoun and Houinyèhouévé: closed quarters, places of worship off-limits to the uninitiated. Here, the deity is aware of your presence, but remains unseen: it allows mortals to live and prosper, but lives hidden away. And it is thanks to traditional knowledge, taboos and totems, tales and legends handed down the generations, that these forests have remained protected from human activity.

However, these now represent only 0.2% of the territory and are threatened by demographic pressure, the expansion of farmland and the rise of evangelical churches. Between 2005 and 2015, Benin’s total forest area shrank by more than 20%, with an ongoing deforestation rate of more than 2% per year according to the World Bank.

Gaël Turine set out to understand and document this complex situation, focusing on the survival of these rituals intricately tied to the existence of a preserved natural environment. Should it disappear, should these sources of life become contaminated, a whole system of beliefs and a complete culture will be lost forever.
www.gaelturine.com

BERNARD PLOSSU: Fresson Colours (France b. 1945)
Bernard Plossu likes to call himself “half-traveller and half-migratory photographer”, but he really needs no introduction. For years, he has been roaming the world, capturing furtive moments in Mexico’s Chiapas, the American West, the Niger desert, the villages of Morocco and on the coast of Brittany. He became famous for his black-and-whites, imbued with iridescent grey. Too often compared to Robert Frank or Édouard Boubat, both of whom he admires, his style is singular and deeply sensitive. His eyes are as sharp as his memory.

When we arrived at his home in La Ciotat, he chuckled about the sedentary lifestyle that has him tied to this building, because his lifelong pursuit of the meaning of life always revolved around travel. With his youthful good looks and tender smile, he took us on a tour of this house of memories where, from floor to ceiling, there are piles of jumbled boxes of negatives, prints of all kinds, old books, drawings donated by his painter friends and objects unearthed over sixty years of wanderlust. “It’s an organised mess,” he explains, “I’m the only one who can locate my little ones.” He wanted to show us a photograph taken in Mexico in 1965. “It’s like a painting!” we exclaimed. An unfortunate compliment. That’s the very thing he dislikes hearing, even though he admits to an affinity with Corot for his lighting, Courbet for his landscapes, Malevitch for his geometric forms and Hopper for his abstract forms.

Right from his earliest photographs, Bernard Plossu invented a visual grammar that combines subjectivity, simplicity, a sensorial dimension and rigorous composition. Here, it is his lesser-known colour photographs that we wanted to showcase with these Fresson prints. The Fresson pigment process was invented in the 19th century by the family of the same name in Savigny-sur-Orge, south of Paris. The special texture and subtle rendering it gives is the perfect match for the no-frills approach adopted by the photographer, who seeks to distance himself from the spectacular and the grandiloquent. What emerges are images of poetry, the kind that sets the world, and its many forms, aflutter. With a powdery, slightly charcoaly finish that gives landscapes an unreal look.


SOPHIE ZÉNON:The Memories of Stones, Discovering sensitive rural heritage in Morbihan (France b. 1965)
Leave the major tourist attractions of Morbihan behind for a while, and set off on the back roads, venture into the Breton moors, follow the coastal paths and get lost in the remote hamlets. You’ll discover a host of hidden treasures built, sculpted and fashioned, sometimes in ancient times. They bear witness to the multitude of activities found here in bygone eras, but are also the seeds of a culture bequeathed to us by our ancestors. You’ll find a chapel with chiselled tympanums, further along a washhouse carved into a hollow, then a crumbling manor house or an imposing granite calvary. Carry on and you’ll come to a megalithic site with endless alignments, like those that astounded Stendhal, who described an ancient procession of stones basking in the atmosphere conjured up by the dark sea…

Over the course of a winter, from Locuan to Locmaria, from l’Île d’Arz to Guehenno, visual artist Sophie Zénon travelled the length and breadth of Morbihan, accompanied by Diego Mens, heritage curator at the département’s council, the initiator of this new photographic commission. So what marked her most? ‘This fusion of granite with the landscape, and with plants in particular. It gives off an atmosphere that is at times serene, at times melancholy, conducive to a form of introspection and meditation.”

This explains the unconventional approach used to capture the shots, as dictated by the artist. She is relentless in her quest to experiment with the photographic medium, which gives rise to organic, vibrant and poetic works. Here, she opted for a series of frontal shots and long shots. She used an old technique, the orotone, a photographic print on a silver gelatine glass plate to which she applied gold tone with a brush. The beholder is treated to a precious, delicate and fragile artefact, imbued with a timeless quality and adorned in shades of black and tan echoing the sacred monuments that hold such significance for the region’s inhabitants.

In the green labyrinth at La Gacilly, the photographs, printed in large format on brushed aluminium, shimmer and play with light and shadow, creating a surprising effect of depth.
www.sophiezenon.com