Garden news

In this age of instant images and their continuous flow, some artists choose patience, attention and detours. They point their lenses at what is not immediately apparent and focus on a light that intrudes, a breath that passes through, a memory that surfaces. For them, nature is neither a backdrop nor a subject; it is a partner in a sensitive dialogue. It is in this spirit that Chaumont-Photo-sur-Loire welcomes photographic works each autumn that resonate with the Domaine’s questions about the visible, presence and time. Here, photography does not illustrate. It reveals, suggests and sometimes disturbs. Each guest photographer engages with the interior and exterior spaces of the château to compose an original journey where the image becomes an experience.

It all begins with an apparition. Alone in the middle of the salt desert, a white, soft and fragile form seems to emerge from a dream. Elina, an ephemeral sculpture designed by Guillaume Barth and exhibited at the Asinerie, was created in the heart of the Salar de Uyuni, in the Bolivian highlands. From this work, born of silence, emerges a series of images that combine the infinity of the landscape, the immaculate light and the symbolic density of a gesture. Both a trace of a ritual and an offering to the world, the sculpture dialogues with the sky, the winds and time. Each photograph bears witness to a powerful encounter between human gesture and the force of the elements, combining myth and memory. These images of a landscape threatened with disappearance due to the lithium reserves buried beneath the lake’s surface are also a call to preserve the beauty of the world.
In a completely different vein, but with the same attention to the passage of time, Kim Boske, installed in the south wing of the château, superimposes moments, as memories do in our minds. By combining different temporalities, the Dutch artist weaves an inner vision of the landscape, made up of echoes, shifts and instabilities. Nature becomes vibration rather than representation. The photographs on display condense the sensory experience of a garden and invite slow, almost meditative contemplation.
Also at the château, Tamás Dezsö constructs a photograph that suspends our perceptual reference points in order to better question the memory of forms and the fragility of the world. Through the series Tout se met à flotter (Everything Begins to Float), he frames plants as closely as possible. Stems, leaves and branches are organised into dense networks, indifferent to our gaze. What we are contemplating is no longer a garden, but a form of plant life, autonomous and resistant to domestication. Photography thus becomes a space where life is condensed, a place where the image renounces naming in order to better allow things to happen.
In the west wing of the château, Vincent Fournier displays his Flora Incognita, flowers from a possible future. Born of an imagination enhanced by contemporary technologies, his hybrid creations question the future of life, but also the ability of photography to generate new fictions. Between speculative herbarium, botanical plate and fashion portrait, these images blur the lines. Each plant seems to emerge from a parallel world, both plausible and unreal, as if nature itself had been reprogrammed. The artist does not document, but composes visions, where artifice illuminates our relationship with the future.
In the reception area and the Porc-Épic room, Santeri Tuori presents images from his Sky series, which he began in 2010 on the island of Kökar in the Finnish archipelago of Åland. A member of the Helsinki School, he composes images of the sky in successive layers, mixing colour with black and white. The sky becomes a space of slow transformation. Without reference points, the gaze lingers, hesitates, and traverses these quasi-pictorial compositions. Beyond representation, they engage the viewer in peaceful and sustained attention.

In line with these unique perspectives, this year a space is dedicated to the Domaine’s photographic collection. This collection bears witness to previous editions of Chaumont-Photo-sur-Loire and retraces its poetic and sensitive memory. More than ever, this new edition invites us to contemplate, to inhabit the moment as we inhabit a landscape, to let the image silently connect us to the living world, so that nature remains a shared enigma and photography an art of mystery.

Chantal Colleu-Dumond
Commissaire de Chaumont-Photo-sur-Loire