De La Côte

For the past fifteen years, Aurore Bagarry has been photographing the sculptural formations of the glaciers of the Alps, the rocky shores of the English Channel and, more recently, the coasts of the Atlantic, from the Gironde and Brittany to Martinique and Guadeloupe.

The repertory of forms thus produced harkens back to a practice already amply present among the pioneers of late 19th-century photography – typologies, herbariums or inventories – which often aimed as much to document nature as to domesticate it. While the incredible nature of these expeditions has been blurred by advances in means of locomotion, the imposing photographic equipment she still uses today comes very close. With her view camera, it’s the same obsession with detail, the refraction of colors and the rustle of light that she tries to reconnect with. Aurore Bagarry’s photographs take us to the confluence of elements that seem impossible to reconcile, to the vertigo of time, the time of an Earth billions of years old that encounters and experiences human time, infinitesimal in comparison.

The coastline is the ideal setting for a reflection on time: it embodies both the memory of slow changes and the urgency of current transformations. The fluidity of the water, its gentleness, its shape that hugs the ground from below, could lead us to believe that it is innocent: it flows around, passive. But it is the water itself that gently shapes the caverns and crevasses. The rock is cut into clearly articulated planes, revealing the layers that have grown up against each other over the millennia. The wind blows in from the mainland, pushing back the ocean before it lays down, still ferocious, on the granite. The ground deforms, the stone slabs slide beneath one another, the mineral erodes.
Plants struggle with the arrow of time. Aurore Bagarry’s landscape photographs are not merely geological testimony or a play on scale, nor do they enunciate or defend the promise of a theory, but open up a dialogue between inside and outside, towards an immensity whose forces surpass us.