A photo-poet and a monk-poet tell us in their own way, in a superb album, the unsuspected horizons revealed to them by contemplation of the ocean at the tip of Brittany. Aïcha Dupoy de Guitard and Gilles Baudry both live in Landévennec, at the entrance to the Crozon peninsula: on one side the maritime Aulne, on the other the bay of Douarnenez. Something, inevitably, to marvel at.
How can we not have an idea of infinity in the face of the immensity that is offered daily to the gaze of the photographer and the monk? Yes, the word “infinitudes” which gives the title to this book expresses well this horizon that we must look for behind the horizon. Basically, a “hinterland” as Rennes publisher Yvan Guillemot says.
Photography, here, is primary. The monk-poet accompanies the exercises of admiration of Aïcha Dupoy de Guitard with his short poems resembling aphorisms. Speaking of her, Alain-Gabriel Monot writes in the afterword: “ Aïcha rebuilds the world. In its quiet and stubborn way (…) Everywhere we are seized by the oceanic feeling at work here “. The photographer, in fact, becomes one with the elements. A fan of sea kayaking, often practiced at the first light of dawn, she captures “rare” moments when the light competes with the fading night. “The emergence of the world/the trembling edge of elsewhere/at first light/and everything that surfaces in the day/in the new light/in the sparkling dawn of the bay,” writes Gilles Baudry, echoing one of his photos.
The sea here is sometimes blue but most often it is green or gray. Spots of light run through it under ever-imposing skies, swollen with heavy clouds. The photographer tells us about the wave and the swell, her body to body with the sea that she travels alongside surfers, windsurfers and paddle enthusiasts. But, invariably, the character glimpsed is a point in the image, lost in the infinity of the sea, solitary as in ancient Chinese paintings where man blends into nature.
“Offshore Dreams”
How, moreover, could a director of underwater exploration programs not have been sensitive to these photographs and these poems? Prefacing this book, Emmanuelle Périé-Bardout, a veteran of marine ecosystems, welcomes “this journey of the moment” that this book establishes and “the possibility of reconnecting with the beauty of the world”, including this precisely underwater world. sailor that Aïcha Dupoy de Guitard frequents on occasion, allowing her happy encounters like with this seal that she “seizes” near the caves of Morgat.
Gilles Baudry provides poetic punctuation here. This is not his first collaboration with the photographer. They have already jointly published Morning of the Trees and Waters of the Interior (Poésie de l’instant, 2017 and 2019). Leaving the forests and rivers which are at the heart of these two books, the landlubber Gilles Baudry, surveyor of the foreshores and with very unnautical feet, has this time ventured into a universe which he usually apprehends from a distance. But the photographs of Aïcha Dupoy de Guitard are for him a beautiful subject of meditation. “Horizon of breath”, “sound miracle”, “intimate immensity”, “land of patience”, “deep-sea dreams”, “transmigrations of souls”: so many words that emerge from his pen. “The sea//the only one that teaches us/the patience of the horizon/received as an inheritance,” writes the Benedictine monk from Landévennec Abbey.
Pierre TANGUY.
Infinitudes, Aïcha Dupoy de Guitard and Gilles Baudry, preface by Emmanuelle Périé-Bardout, afterword by Alain-Gabriel Monot published by Calligrammes/Bernard Guillemot, 125 pages, 25 euros.
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