After several years as a digital photographer, I have been exploring the intricacies of historical techniques for the last eight years.
After Resili O and Un Conte , this is my latest personal project, the culmination of a three-week photographic residency at the Halsnoy Monastery, invited by the Sunnorhland Museum in Norway in the late summer of 2022.
The use of the wet collodion camera is an extension of myself, a slow process that takes place inside.
I entered this world with my camera as high as I am by a strange, sacred and luminous road. There was the beauty, the mystery of the landscapes, the trees, the immense plains, the mountains and then suddenly the sea.
The sacred nature of what my eyes encountered every day when I opened them won me over: I was indeed at the Origins of the World and of genesis.
There was the silence, the mystery, the trees, the light, an intuition linked to the history of the place, this mysterious veil over certain images, incomprehensible, like an aura, the oldest beech in Norway, an odyssey... a world bursting with beauty and celestial tranquillity:
At a time when the galloping world is losing its way and a battered nature is taking its place more than ever, I had the immense good fortune to contemplate a spectacle that was original, contemporary and at the same time timeless. An invisible thread was woven between the air, the water, the wind, nature, the elements and the bodies, surrounded by the luminous varieties of the sea or the sky: a delightful flight into reverie.A free interpretation of Tristan and Yseult, the lovers are the inhabitants of the monastery in sublime nature.
Yseult is a nymph goddess in that ageless primordial space that has nourished the world since the dawn of time: love, against which even the elements or a second Yseult can do nothing, because it is original. It’s a quest for love and eternity.
Love is Mystical
Wild
Ideal
Pure
Infinite
Sacred
Plant
Strange
Magical
Charnel
Celestial
Silent
Passion
Original
Fatal
Eternal
For having made this wonderful adventure possible, I warmly thank
The Sunnhorland Museum for their invitation to the Halsnoy Monastery on the island of Halsnoy in Norway
Helen Petersen and Oyvind Hjelmen for their welcome and trust during this residency
Nicole, Emily and Lucas from the Sunnhorland Folkehogskule ,
Christine Delory-Momberger, who will shortly be writing an accompanying text
Christian Le Dorze, Director of the Bonisson Art Center, for his invaluable support for my work
Florence Verrier of Galerie Parallax and Didier Mandart of L’ANGLE Photographies
Olivier Bourgoin and Agence Révélateur
Technique used: 17x17 and 30x30 cm cameras, Heliar and Russian lenses, wet collodion in tintypes.