PUBLISHER
Editions Xavier Barral

BOOK FORMAT
Clth, 15 x 12.25 in. / 108 pgs / 42 bw.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date 2/28/2011
Out of stock indefinitely

DISTRIBUTION
D.A.P. Exclusive
Catalog: SPRING 2011 p. 99   

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9782915173581 TRADE
List Price: $125.00 CDN $170.00

AVAILABILITY
Not available

FROM THE ARTBOOK BLOG

THOMAS EVANS | DATE 3/12/2011

Jean Gaumy: D’Après Nature

The product shot for Jean Gaumy’s D’Après Nature shows an oversize landscape-format hardcover, with a jacket cover image that might be a photograph or an abstract drawing, like one of Henri Michaux’s scratchy calligraphic ink works. Encountering the volume physically in a bookstore, one would at first fare little better, as the cover only resolves into legibility once your nose is about six inches from it: then suddenly a black-and-white photograph of a snowy mountainscape, striated with bare pines and zigzagging paths, snaps into focus.
D'Après Nature (Xavier Barral, 2010) is one of the most superbly designed and printed photography monographs currently available on the D.A.P. list—from the jacket to the linen binding to the beautiful printing of Gaumy’s beautiful photographs of the valleys and mountains of the Piedmont and the French Pyrenees. With their alternations of snow and rock, these images nudge the viewer into a perceptual gear that at times feels closer to character-reading than image-gazing, insofar as the eye, wandering across these heavily pitted black-and-white landscape views, tends to be scrutinizing “marks.” Lest this imply an extremity of contrast that dispatches each image into poles of black and white, many of the photographs also offer amazing tonal nuance: one somewhat atypical image of a small lake—in fact the scale is weirdly elusive—endows the water with such luminosity that the many shades of grey among the rocks surrounding it come as a pleasant second wave of surprise. continue to blog