Christophe Jacrot: Eaux Fortes
Eaux Fortes is a new dive, at the time when the world was confined, in the heart of a world frozen doubly – by the climate, by the pandemic. It deploys the quintessence of what he has produced over the last two years, always in the four corners of the world.
With this exceptional monograph, Christophe Jacrot gathers a selection of his most intense shots since 2019 (and some older ones): shimmering or immaculate colors of hills and mountains, lonely houses lost in the twirling snow, beings stiffened by the cold and silhouettes vanishing under the rain or snow in large megalopolises, shores almost submerged by the waves… Are the contours of reality fading away at the same time as the world is being swept away in uncertainty?
“I like photo books, a simple and above all intimate way to devour photography. With Eaux Fortes, I’m taking up the idea of a large (40×32 cm) landscape-style book, which won’t fit in your library! I want to offer large images all in fullness, without creases, we enter them as we enter a hot bath.
The confinements were at first a real suffering, then a very strange parenthesis. Alone on the roads, in hotels that were still open, I still felt like I was breaking a rule. Quite a stimulating transgression in the end. The best images from this period will be in my new book.
Eaux Fortes will remain faithful to my work, with my always very pictorial approach. It’s once again an immersion in the “bad weather” with material, and narrative images as I like to do them so much. Much more colorful than my previous two books, as much rain as snow, European, I continue this formal search in bad weather. We are all made up of our climate, our weather, I appeal to our soul. Destroy our climate. it is a little to destroy us too.”
About the Author
Born in 1960, Christophe Jacrot is a contemporary photographer living in Paris. The artist has been dabbling in photography since his adolescence but was first noticed in the cinema. He directed several short films, most of which received awards. Feeling the financial constraints that the cinematographic industry can sometimes impose, Christophe Jacrot turned his attention to photography, an art-form to which he applied his talents utterly.
At one stage commissioned to produce sunny images of Paris for a tourist brochure, the photographer ends up putting together an artistic project involving cities in inclement weather. “The weather was desperately bad, which gave me the idea to photograph several somewhat more untraditional images of Paris to capture these amazing ambiances that few photograph. I had in mind Henri Cartier-Bresson’s fabulous photo of Giacometti in the rain, and the photo of a guy jumping over a puddle in front of the Trocadero, by Elliott Erwitt.”
Out of this project comes, in 2007, a first exhibition at the Lucernaire which very rapidly leads Christopohe Jacrot to the publication of a book of his photography, Paris in the rain (Edition, Chêne.)
Since then he has been successfully continuing this study in different cities. He has photographed Hong Kong, Tokyo or Taipei in the mist and the rain (Hong Kong and Asia in the Rain series) as well as New York in a snow storm ( New York in White series.) In October of 2012 again in New York Christophe photographed entire districts devoid of electricity and plunged into darkness after Hurricane Sandy (New York in Black series.) More recently the photographer headed for Iceland and its natural landscapes and the coast of Normandy in France which he has captured under a thick blanket of snow and in the midst of a storm. (via artistics.com/)
