Souvenir de la Tourte de Besse

Souvenir de la Tourte de Besse is a book of photographs celebrating bread and mountains. The bread is Yves Saint-Pierre’s, and the mountain is the Oisans. In 1993, using stones from a village ruin and trees from a family plot, Yves and Véronique built a bakery in Besse, at an altitude of 1450 meters.

In the book, traditional gestures and the landscape in which they are embedded are brought together as a single material, under the powerful light of August and December. It’s a passage. Sometimes you have to disappear to exist again.

Clara Prioux photographed the Tourte de Besse for two summers and one winter, as the last batch approached. In addition to a selection of fifty black and white photographs, the book contains two previously unpublished texts by Yves Saint-Pierre.