Lavender in Black and White
It suffices to say its name to conjure up a shimmering field of violet waves. The soothing image and perfume of lavender are integral to Provence’s landscape and to the history of L’Occitane. It is impossible to imagine the deterioration of this flower that has always survived the region’s harsh climate.
And yet the cultivation of lavender is currently facing two major problems: a decline induced by phytoplasma, a disease transmitted by leafhoppers, and climate change. In recent years, the production of lavender essential oil in Provence has been reduced by half.
Today, L’Occitane reinforces its commitment to preserving and promoting the heritage linked to lavender. Apart from financing a foundation to support research programmes, L’Occitane strives to make the greater public aware of the decline of Provence’s emblematic flower. To do so, L’Occitane is a partner of the 2013 Rencontres d’Arles, participating in a project especially devised by Portuguese photographer Paulo Nozolino and devoted to lavender. This new vision of the icon of Provence’s flora will then travel around the world.
‘By choosing the black and white work of photographer Paulo Nozolino to recount the tale of lavender and its decline in our region, we wanted to give priority to the creative act of the artist’s incisive gaze in comparison with a visual accumulation that supposedly reproduces reality.’
Olivier Baussan
Paulo Nozolino was born in Lisbon, Portugal, in 1955. He Lives and works between Lisbon and Paris. Paulo Nozolino is one of the central figures of contemporary photography. His journey begins in the 1970s in London where he went to live. Then Paris, from the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, was his basis for a long series of travels across the Arab world, as well as Europe, after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Books like Penumbra and Solo are good examples of his political concerns with a changing society. He returned to Portugal in 2002, after an anthological exhibition – Nada – at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris. In 2005, Museu de Serralves, in Porto, invited him to a new anthological – Far Cry – first time ever to show work by a Portuguese photographer.
A frontal artist, Nozolino sees photography the same way he sees life, using it to understand both the world and himself and taking it to the limits of his quest, his answers and his experiences. There is no room for complacency in his work. Destruction means destruction, death means death. Constant cycles in his historical time par excellence, the twentieth century, and even more alive in the present moment, as is stated in his most recent works, Bone Lonely, Makulatur, Usura and Gloom.
Public recognition accompanies the artist’s work from the beginning. Awards such as the Villa Médicis (1994), in France, or the Grande Prémio Nacional de Fotografia (2006) and the Prémio Sociedade Portuguesa de Autores (2013), in Portugal, are reflections of such notoriety.
Paulo Nozolino –L’Occitane en Provence
1 July – 24 August 2013
3 September – 22 September 2013
Palais de Luppé
13200 Arles
France
10am – 7:30pm
Free entry
