synopsis
I do not know when this series started precisely. Probably not at the first picture. I believe that all this goes back much further, beyond my own memory. These are images that jostle each other: a priest dressed in a long black cape, walking in the snow in the heart of a forest, balancing on his shoulders a photographic chamber. They are still pictures of kids running down meadows, a piece of wood on which some insects have been nailed, jumps in a spillway and a falling drawer. This drawer, escaped from a small bedside table that I moved in December 2013, thus released what he concealed: A bistro bill and a medical prescription, both dated 1947, a handful of cotton, a photograph on which included my mother, finally paper for the maintenance of optical glasses. This bedside is one of those furniture to which I am attached and in which inadvertently, my maternal grandmother, died in 2008, had let escape these few elements, hidden for 60 years. The most disturbing thing in this discovery was not papers, nor photography, but rather this precious thing, locked up there for all these years ... delicate confinement: its smell.The cotton wad contained its odor. I kept the set carefully to show it to his daughter, my mother, before sliding each item back behind the drawer, in the heart of this almost inaccessible double bottom, where remains the circumscribed odor of my grandmother. My black seasons are those of childhood, seasons plunged in darkness, which the weather each day covers more. The photographed territory is a French countryside where I grew up, and whose landscapes, similar to this bedside table, hide my memory, all the smells and the tastes that gradually constituted me, the sensations, the seasoned life, season after season.
photos of the book
technical information
Publisher : Lamaindonne
2016
160 pages, 87 color photos
dimensions : 21 x 27,5 cm
2016
160 pages, 87 color photos
dimensions : 21 x 27,5 cm
about Julien Coquentin
by the author
Between 2012 and 2023, I published five books with Lamaindonne publishing, which combined my appetite for documentary and an attention paid to my loved ones and my immediate environment. In 2013, an urban wandering in the streets of Montreal: Early on a Sunday Morning. In 2014, Eight Days in New York and in 2016, Black Seasons, in which I explore the ties that hold us to our native land - a series notably exhibited at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in La-Roche-sur-Yon (2016), at Imagesingulières in Sète (2017) and during the Photographic Summer of Lectoure (2019). In 2020 I published Tropiques, a fiction, mixing photographs and several short stories in the manner of a tale, exhibited during the Lectoure Photographic Summer (2021) and finally Oreille coupée (2023), a work constructed in the form of an ecological and sociological investigation on the traces of the wolf in the Massif Central; a work that is fortunate to benefit from a cycle of exhibitions (2023-2025) in the Diagonal network (Carré d'Art gallery in Chartres-de-Bretagne, La Chambre in Strasbourg and Le Centre Claude Cahun in Nantes). This same series will benefit from an exciting media broadcast with a portfolio published in M et Zadig and an invitation to the microphone of Marie Richeux, on France Culture, during the program "Par les temps qui courent". In 2023, Mat Jacob and Monica Santos are offering me a writing residency at Zone I in Loir-et-Cher, with the design of a novel, Gast, co-published by Filigranes/Zone i. Also in 2024, I will publish a book entitled L’Aval with Origini edizioni, in which I will once again mix words with photography in a very restricted area of my geography, bringing together themes that are dear to me, particularly those of the forest and childhood.
Apart from my long series, a member of the Hans Lucas collaborative platform since 2017, I regularly work with the French press as well as in artistic mediation with the Prodiges association, particularly in remand centers, nursing homes, GEMs and colleges.
Apart from my long series, a member of the Hans Lucas collaborative platform since 2017, I regularly work with the French press as well as in artistic mediation with the Prodiges association, particularly in remand centers, nursing homes, GEMs and colleges.
find / buy the book
book in my collection
Publisher : Lamaindonne
2016
160 pages, 87 color photos
dimensions : 21 x 27,5 cm
2016
160 pages, 87 color photos
dimensions : 21 x 27,5 cm