Far East

Far East – For four autumns, Géraldine Lay photographed Japan. Each year, she found the same white light that makes the colors burst. Traveling by train from one point to another, she gradually moved away from the big cities, in search of a less spectacular daily life, rougher perhaps, and in search of a new material, literally and figuratively.

For her images are abundant in wefts and textures, from which emerge here and there intense flats of color. It is difficult not to think of painting. However, the photographer, perhaps following in the footsteps of the author of In Praise of the Shadow, the writer Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, plays with the shadow as never before. A strangeness runs through the landscapes as well as through his characters – something unresolved that nevertheless catches us.

In the course of correspondences as subtle as they are obvious, the eye navigates from image to image. From the four autumns, 50 pictures have been carefully selected. They compose a portrait of Japan, the story of a Western photographer’s itinerary in the heart of a country where four cubic rocks by the sea unleash an entire imagination.