“This book retraces ten years of photographs in the wild. The starting point was a very large tide in Northern Finistère, winter 2012. This mixture of sand and water desert at low tide gave me the ‘Want to plant a tree and photograph it. Symbolically I then started working with paper sculptures installed very far on the foreshore. It was necessary to work between two tides and I often lost the work before even Photographing it was a play of patience.
Photographing nature corresponds for me to a space of liberation. I am certainly related to my subject, but I am also a little next to myself. At the heart of a forest or by a lake, there is no perfection or imperfection, everything is already there and I am in a way without object, hence this need for non-alterity. There is a kind of self -dilution with nature and we can actually talk about communion.
I like simple forms or materials to deconstruct like crumpled paper. These are both aesthetic symbols and objects that are there to somehow pay homage to the place. I then artificialize the natural space a little, I may also humanize it, even if it is not my initial statement. What matters essentially is the discovery of the place and sometimes, as Hubert Reeves writes, the space takes the form of my gaze “.

Benjamin Deroche