In love with Belle-île-en-mer, a French island off the coast of Brittany, Philippe Ulliac has made it his life’s mission to unveil its timeless beauty. Twenty-five years of work have culminated in the publication of a new book.
His imperious gaze looks straight ahead. He has just spotted a strange curve on top of a rock: it’s a cormorant about to take flight. “He is nimble,” says Philippe Ulliac as he handles his camera, as usual stalking the marine inhabitants of the isle. He takes us to a favorite spot of his where he likes to photograph storms. “Look, the swell isn’t high today, but it already slaps the rocks, so you can just imagine what’s like during a storm!,” he says, adding confidentially: “Once, we took a helicopter and we were flying at a relatively low altitude. That day, the swell was as high as 15 meters! Can you imagine? When waves crash against the rocks, you should see the thundering noise it produces, it’s breathtaking!”
It is so breathtaking, in fact, that Philippe Ulliac never misses the spectacle unleashed by the ocean. “When the waves break against the cliff, it is absolutely deafening, you can’t imagine!” The result is spellbinding photographs in which the little lighthouse on the Pointe des Poulains, on the northern tip of the island, appears to be engulfed by the waves; the breakers are so powerful that they seem to shatter into a firework display of sea spray and foam; and the immense tidal waves carve the rock— the brittle, volcanic rock typical of Belle-île-en-mer—into jagged saw teeth or uncanny figures. “Here, for example, are my two orangutans,” with visible delight Philippe Ulliac points to two rocks that resemble large apes.
The skin of the island
It is that very volcanic rock that the photographer has managed to capture with surgical precision in his book Belle-île-en-mer 47º20’33 NORD – 3º8’57 OUEST, accompanied by the texts of his disciple Catherine Liber. Philippe Ulliac is proud of his close-ups of schist sediments which reveal an incredible color palette: pastel pink, orange, ocher, saffron. He shows the mysterious skin of the island which shimmers with a myriad lights that combine into vivid tableaus and astonishing scenes where sea spray blends with the rocks and seems to dance in the wind. “The weather changes here from one moment to the next,” explains the photographer; “it is impossible to tell too far in advance what it will be like. You must go and see for yourself.” At the age of sixty-two, Philippe Ulliac continues to climb the wild coastline in search of sublime landscapes made of clouds, freshly fallen rain, tiny ripples that pass over the beach and reveal the splendor of the place. One particularly drizzly, typically Breton day, he notes slyly: “we often wait for the rain.”
Jean-Baptiste Gauvin
Jean-Baptiste Gauvin is a journalist, writer, and stage-director. He lives and works in Paris.
Philippe Ulliac, Belle-île-en-mer
Self-published
€39
Available online:
