A Certain Nature After Giverny

The garden of French painter Claude Monet (1840-1926), located in Giverny, is world-famous for its water lily pond, which inspired the artist and gave rise to some sumptuous paintings. The estate now welcomes almost 350,000 visitors a year and remains a magical place. A member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts and the Magnum Photos agency, photographer Jean Gaumy has had privileged access to this garden for many years. An ideal playground for this keen observer of nature, he experiments throughout the seasons with photography that is both abstract and naturalistic. This science enthusiast has succeeded in using the site to produce an original body of work: formal research into plants, compositions that border on the pictorial, or almost microscopic detail, the garden becomes something else, something out of time. This elsewhere is in fact what the artist is looking for. Her attraction to this place stems from memories of her own childhood and the joy she experienced in her family's garden. A familiar, safe place, a place of curiosity, it had such a profound effect on the photographer in his early years that he sought to bring his memories of Giverny back to life. The book is not an atlas of forms, but rather a photographic experiment to show what nature produces from a different angle. The images are accompanied by a text detailing the mysterious relationship between flora and imagination.