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. read the full post
Claude Monet's garden at Giverny is famous the world over for its water lily pond, which gave rise to some of the artist's most dazzling paintings. Magnum photographer Jean Gaumy (born 1948) has had privileged access to Monet's garden for many years, allowing him to conduct photographic research inspired by his love of science and botany. Drawing from the joy he experienced in his family's garden while young, he has sought to re-create that childhood curiosity and sense of wonder through photography that is both abstract and naturalistic. Jean Gaumy's Giverny is not an atlas of forms, but rather a photographic experiment in documenting nature from different angles. In these otherworldly duotone photographs, Monet's storied garden becomes something out of time in compositions bordering on the pictorial in their documenting of microscopic details.
A student of modern literature, Jean Gaumy started his professional career as a newspaper editor and photographer for a daily newspaper in France. His first publication was L'hôpital (The Hospital, 1976), a stark statement on the French health system. His 1983 study of French prison life was likewise considered pioneering. In 1977 Gaumy joined Magnum and became a full member in 1986. Since then, Gaumy has made both films and photoworks. This beautiful, large-format publication is based upon Gaumy's hikes and climbs in the Occitan Piedmont and the French Pyrenees. Superbly printed in black and white on matte paper stock, Gaumy's photographs detail the pitted mountainscapes of these regions, both up close and from afar, in an austere but luxuriant document of geologic time. The volume closes with excerpts from René Daumal's great mountaineering novel Mount Analogue (1937). D'Après Nature will delight all connoisseurs of the photobook.
Jean Gaumy: D'Après Nature