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Chaumont-Photo-sur-Loire proposes a new way of looking at nature through the photographer’s eye. This 7^th edition brings together five artists whose attraction to nature has made them witnesses and magicians, whether they have decided to explore the world in search of the wounds inflicted on it by humans, to erase the urban or the colours of life to produce true pictorial representations, or to transform the landscape into mysterious and captivating horizons. Each of them stands on the threshold of a time that he shares with us.
Translated with DeepL.com (free version)

While each year Chaumont-Photo-sur-Loire is an opportunity for us to draw visitors’ attention to the precious and fragile nature of our planet, this year’s event focuses on the need for a rapid global awareness of the terrifying dangers facing nature, but also aims to offer images that are conducive to happy contemplation, because we are convinced that our world needs peace and beauty. Striking a balance between these two objectives seems essential to us.

In the upper galleries of the Château, Edward Burtynsky presents a major series of images taken in Africa. The nature of this continent, which many still believe to be unspoilt, is being abused. Burtynsky’s spectacular, aesthetically impeccable images bring us face to face, without appearing to do so, with perilous ecological realities. When man oversteps the mark, Burtynsky captures the full extent.

Also at the Château, Laurent Millet shares with us his experience of the tropical forests of Indonesia. Captivated by their profusion, density, luxuriance and verticality, and impressed by the feeling of being both surrounded and rejected by them, the photographer delivers sumptuous visions inspired by brocades and fabrics imported from the Orient.

Letizia Le Fur invites us on an entirely different journey in the Galerie du Porc-Épic. Her images of Tahiti are like no other. The landscapes, sometimes oppressive in nature, lose their colourful shimmer. The turquoise of the lagoon, the green of the luxuriant forest, the red of the hibiscus… all the colours disappear to let our gaze plunge into a world floating between dream and fiction.

In the lower gallery of the East wing, Nicolas Bruant brings the world’s discretion to the fore. Leaving aside colour for a palette of light and shade, the photographer goes beyond the ordinary to create a new plastic reality. Accustomed to photographing the men and women he meets along the way, here he reveals an unsuspected nature, revealed through his eyes alone.

In a completely different register, Jens Liebchen’s snow-covered landscapes are equally captivating. Set in the Asinerie, they seem devoid of all human activity. Yet the attentive eye gradually deciphers the image. Like actors on a stage, the trees, their contours subtly outlined by the light, make us forget that they are standing in the middle of Tokyo. Delicate and orderly, the series is immediately in keeping with the Japanese pictorial tradition, but it also tells us something about the society that produced it.

At the intersection of these five approaches lie time and silence. The time of travel and of the workshop, the silence of observation and of creation: two photographic ingredients that allow for so many singular readings of this natural environment that is precious to us, but that all too often indifferent to us. Learning to look is already loving. It’s starting to realise and respect the infinite beauty that surrounds us.