2024-2025 Art season
Chaumont-Photo-sur-Loire

It is a different view of nature through the eye of the photographer that is on offer at Chaumont-Photo-sur-Loire. This 7^th edition showcases five artists who, through their love of nature, have become both witnesses and magicians, whether by exploring the world in search of the wounds inflicted on it by human activity, blotting out urban features or erasing the colours of life to create true pictorial representations, or transforming the landscape into mysterious and captivating horizons. Each stands on the verge of a moment they have chosen to share with us.

Every year, Chaumont-Photo-sur-Loire is our opportunity to draw visitors’ attention to the precious yet fragile quality of nature. This year’s edition focuses on the urgent need for consciences to awaken at global level to the terrifying dangers facing the planet. At the same time, it presents images that lend themselves to joyful contemplation, reflecting our firm conviction that the world is in need of peace and beauty. Striking a balance between these two objectives is essential in our eyes.

In the Château’s upper Galleries, Edward Burtynsky presents a major series of photos taken in Africa. Although many may believe that nature is unspoilt on this continent, in fact it is endangered. Without our realising it, the Canadian photographer’s spectacular views with their faultless aesthetic quality bring us face-to-face with perilous ecological realities. When humans overstep the mark, Burtynsky captures the full extent of the issue.

Also in the Château, Laurent Millet shares his experience of the Indonesian rainforest. Awed by its profusion, density, luxuriance and verticality and struck by the sense of being embraced and rejected all at the same time, the photographer presents gorgeous visions inspired by brocades and fabrics imported from the East.

Letizia Le Fur, meanwhile, invites us on an entirely different journey in the Porcupine Gallery. Her images of Tahiti are without compare. Landscapes of sometimes oppressive wildlife are stripped of their shimmering colours. The turquoise of the lagoon, the green of the luxuriant forest, the red of the hibiscus... all colour disappears as our gaze is plunged into a world floating between dreams and fiction.

In the Lower East wing Gallery, Nicolas Bruant brings all the world’s discretion to the fore. Abandoning colour for a palette of light and shade, the photographer goes beyond what we ordinarily see to fashion a new visual reality. Used to photographing strangers he passes on his way, here he portrays a surprising side of nature revealed only through his eyes.

In a different register altogether, Jens Liebchen’s snowy landscapes are equally spellbinding. Presented in the Donkey Stables, they are seemingly devoid of all human activity, and yet the attentive eye will decipher the image a little at a time. Like actors on a stage with silhouettes subtly outlined by the light, the trees make us forget that they are in the middle of Tokyo. Delicate and ordered, the series points directly to Japanese pictorial tradition, but also tells us something of the society that produced it.

At the intersection between these five views lie time and silence. The time spent travelling and in the studio and the silence of observation and creation: two photographic ingredients that offer up a range of very singular insights into this natural environment that is so precious yet all too often ignored. To learn to observe is to learn to love, to begin to gain awareness and to respect the infinite beauty that surrounds us.