Terres Basses is Gabrielle Duplantier’s second book published with Éditions Lamaindonne (the first, now out of print, was released in 2014), and it must be said that the publishing house director, David Fourré, produces luxurious volumes.
The book opens with a sinuous footpath cutting across a murky landscape that takes us on a journey through Gabrielle Duplantier’s shimmering, powerful, and subtle images.
While her work is far from obsolescence, being rather timeless, the form of her work is nevertheless reminiscent, through its poetry and its literary power of evocation (its treatment of light, the velvety texture of the images, the sublimated femininity of the embodied, angelic figures) of Victorian photography, in particular Julia Margaret Cameron.
Terres Basses is a book of mourning: it is dense, grave, and profound, populated by landscapes bathed in enigmatic light and human figures plunged in muted, inaccessible melancholy. Duplantier’s photographs resound with invocations, and the artist’s voice seems to whisper, “earth to earth, dust to dust…” Gabrielle Duplantier lifts a veil, suggesting certain vulnerability without ever being indecent. While her world is anchored in her personal life and in her homeland, the Basque Country, she goes far beyond any autobiographic narrative and lends materiality to dreams and fictions.
Intimately linked to nature, Terres Basses is as earthly as it is celestial, and oscillates between the sacred and the marvelous which shine through as if the photographer were telling a fairytale, a story in which, on any page, enchantment, disaster, or mystery might take center stage. The images are often imbued with a nearly religious feeling: women with the face of a Madonna, ghostly sunlight, saintly figures making an appearance here and there. This is about mourning, resurrection, and rebirth.
There is no text in the whole book, except for the following phrase from Alberto Rosa which serves as its conclusion: “Life is the Light in Matter.” There is silent light, a luminescence that surges from and is embodied in every page of the book.
Caroline Bénichou
Caroline Bénichou is a writer and exhibition curator specializing in photography. She lives and works in Paris, where she heads Galerie VU’.
Gabrielle Duplantier, Terres Basses
Published by Éditions Lamaindonne
€36
