Seven views of the Sainte-Victoire Mountain - 2019

Technique: photography
Exhibition available in 2 formats for outdoor use and 1 format for indoor use.

The signs, the information that each of us grasps when faced with a landscape (whatever it may be), depend on our interests, our history, our projects, the strategies that we develop to understand an environment in space and time.

"The photographs in the series Seven Views of the Sainte-Victoire Mountain come from work carried out during a residency in 2019 in Aix en Provence and which I then entitled "Archives of Aix en Provence": still lifes, studio views and landscapes of the Sainte-Victoire.
(…)
In the morning, I photographed still lifes in the studio that had been made available to me. I then widened the scope and photographed the studio. In the afternoon, I went walking around the Sainte-Victoire mountain, starting at the beginning of the Tholonet road and then, more and more often, from Cézanne's cabin at the Bibémus quarries.
(…)
I knew that the Sainte-Victoire was represented more than 80 times by Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) and that he had, through his work, opened a path towards abstraction...
At the Granet Museum in Aix-en-Provence, I found "French archives", a book bringing together images by the American photographer Harry Callahan (1912-1999) taken during his stay in the city in 1957/1958: landscapes, street images, still lifes, special treatments of contrasts, superimpositions...
I had long been interested in the viewpoints, compositions and colours of the Italian painter Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964) and had read that he had discovered Cézanne's work through black and white reproductions…

The photographer doesn't just record what's in front of his lens. He confronts landscapes with his own history, his thoughts, his expectations, his concerns as a creator.