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Sabine Guédamour, “Consolation”

Sabine Guédamour presents “Consolation” at the Speos Gallery – 7 rue Jules Vallès, 75011 Paris.
Exhibition from October 6th to November 7th, 2014

In the Jura Mountains, the Valley of Consolation cuts its way through a landscape of stones and water, trees and light. Thanks to a chance encounter and lead by a strong desire to run away, Sabine Guédamour discovered this place in 2010, heavily packed with her photographic equipment and tripod. Hiking is the only way to get there and the scenery offers a great reward after the effort: a magical place, away from the world.

After shooting with a large view camera, she chose to print her images with palladium, a historical photographic process where the alchemy of photography operates with light and metal salts, like when it was invented, more than 150 years ago. The palladium, an extremely perennial process, provides prints identical in size to the negative, with endless and deep shades of grey, profoundly embedded within the paper. After the shooting, amidst nature and silence, comes long hours of printing in the darkroom, improvised in a bathroom in the Paris suburbs. Despite the important geographical gap and the radical change of atmosphere, a continuity in the emotion and precision remains.

The photographs of “Consolation” reveal a certain appeasement in a landscape where the geological time mingles with the seasons. We can no longer hear the waterfalls or birdsongs, but we can see the water eroding the rock and buds sprouting. Sabine Guédamour transforms this lost paradise into a monochrome contemplation. Photographing to reach a resilience, to protect a memory against extinction.

Sabine Guedamour is a free-lance photographer living in Paris, France. For several years, she studied and worked in the US and especially has been involved with Tilt Gallery, a Phoenix-based gallery dedicated to photographic historical processes.
In 2008, she returned to France and decided to study at Speos, Paris Photographic Institute. While continuing her activities with Tilt Gallery and developing her photographic projects, she is currently working for the Galerie Esther Woerdehoff.

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