2025/2026 Art Season
Chaumont-Photo-sur-Loire

It all starts with an apparition. Alone in the middle of a salt flat, a soft, fragile, white form seems to emerge as if from a dream. Elina is an ephemeral sculpture created by Guillaume Barth in the heart of Salar de Uyuni, in the highlands of Bolivia, and on display at the Donkey Stables. The work rises up from the silence and gives birth to a series of images combining infinite landscape, immaculate light and the symbolic density of a gesture. As a mark left by a ritual and an offering made to the world all at the same time, the sculpture enters into conversation with the sky, the wind and time itself. Each photograph is a testimonial to a powerful encounter between the hand of humanity and the power of the elements, combining myth and memory. The images depict a landscape endangered by the lithium deposits beneath the lake’s surface, and stand as a call to preserve the world’s beauty.

In the south wing of the château and in a very different register, but with the same attention to the passage of time, Kim Boske overlays moments like memories in our mind. By combining timescales, the Dutch artist weaves an inner vision of the landscape, made up of echoes, shifts and instability. Here, nature becomes vibration more than representation. The photographs on display distil the sensory experience of a garden and invite viewers to engage in slow, almost meditative contemplation.

Continuing on through the château, Tamás Dezsö builds photography that suspends the reference points of our perception, so as to better interrogate the memory of form and fragility of the world. Through the Tout se met à flotter (Everything begins to float) series, he frames the plant world as close as possible. Stems, leaves and branches are organised in dense networks, indifferent to our gaze. It is no longer a garden that we’re contemplating, but a form of green thought, self-sufficient, resisting all efforts to tame it. Photography becomes a space for living matter to be distilled, a place where the image stops trying to name things and simply lets them come.

In the west wing of the château, Vincent Fournier unleashes his Flora Incognita, flowers from a possible future. Born out of an imagery augmented by modern technology, his hybrid creations raise questions as to the fate of the living world and photography’s capacity to generate new forms of fiction. Between speculative herbarium, botanical drawing and fashion portrait, these images disrupt established registers. Each plant seems to rise out of a parallel world, plausible and unreal at the same time, as if nature itself had been reprogrammed. The artist does not seek to document, but rather composes visions in which artifice sheds light on our relationship to the future.

In the reception lounge and the Porcupine Room, Santeri Tuori presents images from his Sky series, which he started in 2010 on the island of Kökar in Finland’s Åland archipelago. This member of the Helsinki School composes images of the sky in successive strata, mixing colour with black-and-white. Here, the sky becomes a space of slow transformation. Deprived of its reference points, the gaze slows down, hesitates and traverses these almost pictorial compositions. Beyond representation, they elicit a peaceful and constant attention.

Continuing on from these artists’ singular gazes, a space is dedicated this year to the Domain’s photography collection. It testifies to previous editions of Chaumont-Photo-sur-Loire, retracing poetic and sensory memories. More than ever, this new edition invites us to engage in contemplation, to inhabit the moment as if it were a landscape, and to let the image connect us silently to the living world, so that nature remains a shared enigma, and photography, an art of mystery.