The series on Hokkaidō by Catherine Henriette is on view at Galerie Leica in Paris until March 28th 2026, under the title Le bruit de la neige (The Sound of Snow).
The accompanying text, was written by Gabriel Bauret:
There are photographers – artists – who regularly put their work back on the table; who deliberately limit their visual field with the aim of bringing to light the diversity of nuances that compose it. One also thinks of painters such as Giorgio Morandi, who worked without ever leaving his studio, endlessly moving his objects often the same bottles and vases – in order to renew the encounters of forms and colours that would each time inspire different compositions. A photographer who works outdoors as a landscapist, like Catherine Henriette cannot physically intervene on the motif: it is given to them; they do, however, have the possibility of trying out different shooting angles, or of patiently waiting for the moment when light and colour will shape the landscape in a new way. In his time, the painter Claude Monet proceeded methodically by choosing to set up a studio facing Rouen Cathedral, or by returning to paint the same row of poplars.
There is therefore no need to spread oneself too thin: the landscape invites, for those who know how to observe it, a contemplation of its riches, of its multiple and infinitesimal variations. After an initial stay in 2019, Catherine Henriette decided to return several times to this same region of Hokkaidō, at the extreme north of Japan; more precisely to Wakkanai, the terminus of a railway line near Cape Sōya. It is a stretch of coastline where no one really wants to go in the middle of winter, so harsh is the climate, so violent the wind, so intense the cold, so short the days and so rare the light; but being familiar with high-altitude stays in the Pyrenean mountains, such conditions did not frighten her. The stormy climate in this part of Japan offers her the opportunity to confront a landscape that lends itself to multiple visual renderings. And it is within a reduced perimeter – she never ventures very far from the place where she is staying – and during the few hours of midday light that she finds her material to photograph. There are few traces of life or movement; apart from the flight of a few crows whose black silhouettes appear, in her viewfinder, like so many graphic punctuation marks. The place has been deserted by fishermen, the fish factories are closed. At this time of year they do not want to brave the hostile weather to take their boats out: a few of them, frozen into the landscape and largely covered with snow, loom out of the mist like ghosts. Clouds, low skies, snowflakes driven by the wind that sometimes form a screen, and a grey sea in the distance – all these elements fill the frame of the image. Some plants, a few reed stalks or the dried flowers of sunflowers, put up resistance and emerge from the snow dunes; they draw timid lines of colour, standing out against a palette of tones that unfolds essentially between white and grey.
Sometimes, during the day, a clearing appears, the sun tries to pierce the cloud layer and the atmosphere is transformed.
The photography of Catherine Henriette thus stands out through subtle artistic qualities while at the same time conveying sensations: emptiness, a world at a standstill, wrapped in silence, allowing one to imagine what the sound of snow might be. But this solitary experience is perhaps also for her the occasion to confront “a formidable face-to-face with herself” that invites her to “widen her inner space” – to borrow the words of the writer Charles Juliet about the pictorial work of the artist Fabienne Verdier. Might the practice of landscape in such a universe therefore be, for her, the vehicle of an existential quest?
Gabriel Bauret
Catherine Henriette : Le bruit de la neige
Until 28 March 2026
Galerie Leica – Paris
26 Rue Boissy d’Anglas
75008 Paris, France
https://leica-camera.com/en-US/Leica-Galleries/Leica-Gallery-Paris
