À haute voix

Présentation by GwinZegal:

[translation by L'Ascenseur Végétal]

" Eyes closed, she is looking at us. We are listening to her.

The silence of Alexandra's images.

Which words does she want to whisper to us, are they made of the same wind that blows over the landscapes? Of the same oxygen exhaled by the plants? Eyelids open or closed, these faces that we are gazing at, are looking at us as much as we are looking at them.

Alexandra Catière came across these faces during celebrations in small villages, in improvised studios in Brittany, far from the actors' faces in a D.W. Griffith movie or expressionists close-ups of the silent era avant-garde cinema of Eisenstein. The wrinkles, the folds, the roughness, the sparkling of our eyes are as many details that form simultaneously the interface of our social relationships and the layers of our identity. Beauty and melancholy standing alongside each other. One humble and dignified face after the other in a silence that only the roar of a laughter could break.

To say that photographs contain within them a promise of timelessness is merely meaningless commentary, but yet, these faces, these landscapes, these few still lifes by Alexandra Catière seem definitely impervious to the subterfuges of modernity and its empire built upon the world. The damaged clock of progress makes way for a sensual and intimate clock with a temperamental rhythm, matter and memory.

The features of Alexandra's face come alive between mystery and laughter, in the ambiguity of a life and of an anachronistic, asynchronous identity, marked by the youth in Minsk, by the escape to New York, by the daily life in Paris. The scenes she photographs, the compositions and the simplest objects put on the pomp of the sacred and seem to obey the grammar of a mysterious liturgy.

A simple chair or flower petals under a drizzle wish to convey more than what they are. The gaze suddenly becomes meditative. As if Alexandra wanted to encourage us to listen carefully to the poetic fragility of the world, to the sound of water, to the laughter that rolls towards the sea - and to cultivate at last a new and salutary energy in our tormented relationship to the living, to ourselves and to the others. "

NB: The above text by Jérôme Sother, the publisher behind GwinZegal, is included in the book in French only. It is translated here in full by L'Ascenseur Végétal (not vetted either by the writer / publisher or the photographer). You can read the French original in its entirety in the French version of this page (top menu, click on English to switch to French).

48 pages - Softcover

GwinZegal, 2022

Format : 24 x 33 cm

New - Mint condition