Remember the White Horses opens with an image of a road running through woodland on a summer’s day. A journey begins. But this is no classic road trip. Instead, the journey is a familiar one, both in the sense of a family outing and a metaphoric journey. The images – monochrome, warm-toned, set in the middle of silky white pages – are highly sensual. We see a woman and a child, both naked in the sunshine. And a little white family dog. The woman is swimming in the river, outstretched beneath the water. Then she is sitting, face tilted upwards towards the warmth of the sun. The child is lying in the long grass laughing at a large sky, open to new experiences and possibilities.
There are also white horses, two of them, in a meadow. In two consecutive images, we see them move up a hill towards the viewer. These images seem to set a wider symbolic context, suggesting ideas of fecundity, vitality and purity as well as contradictory notions of domesticity and unknown power. They also provide a bridge between different passages of the book; the first, the adventure in and around the river, and the second, a kind of returning home, across fields to a village.
The imagery is idyllic. However, there is also a tangible sense of the vulnerability and anxiety that comes with familial love and parenthood. Our first sighting of the child is of him reaching for his mother’s hand, tentatively entering the water. There are then two photographs of the boy being held by his mother, hip high, in the river. This is the only time that there are photographs placed facing each other, as if to emphasise this act of parental protection.
This is not the only tension that runs through the book. Remember the White Horses is a lyrical book, dealing with themes of love and parenthood in a deeply personal way. Yet, at the same time, there is a distance and restraint. The book has an elegant sparseness about it. The images are understated and quiet, the composition simple and instinctive.
We are left questioning whose view of family and parenthood this is. Rather than the camera acting as one’s own, or some abstract, set of eyes, there is a strong suggestion that the person behind the camera is the third member of the family; the partner and father in the classic family triad. From this perspective, we are left wondering about authorship. Is this a narrative about family we can take at face value? With its idealisation and notes of vulnerability, it seems likely that it reveals much more about the preoccupations of the unseen partner and father.
Reviewed by Josephine Dixon
Remember the White Horses
By Stefan Vanthuyne
Published by Le caillou bleu
32 pages, hardback
ISBN 978-2-930537-19-1
€22.00 retail
