GABRIELLE DUPLANTIER

 Summer Workshop  •  August 12-18, 2023

Private Visions

Photography stands as a captivating way of expressing emotion in response to the world and things, a way of connecting with ourselves through the gaze we place on what surrounds us. It enables us, by means of real contexts, to probe, reveal or even go beyond faces, settings and landscapes, to recreate a universe.

Discovering a new place is an extraordinary opportunity for exploration, and for loosening our grip on the everyday.

Portraits, landscapes, atmospheres: all participants will be invited to assimilate their new surroundings to create a series of personal images ‒ with a spontaneous or a more pondered approach ‒ to shape a creative path that they can take as their own.

Real or invented, all doors are open.

As the week progresses, the series embarked on will gradually be refined through dialogue and reflection on each individual photographer’s imagery and inclinations.

“Gabrielle Duplantier is part of a lengthy French tradition in female photographers who have built within themselves a personal universe with its roots in the familiar landscape of their childhood or daily life. Simply living before all else, breathing the air of a context, the wonderful things in life or the strong emotions stirred by encountering them, so that these are returned with the poetry of amazement or the power of their torment.

Gabrielle has established herself as one of the most powerful contemporary voices in photography, a voice that immediately carries like flamenco or fado, a cry that is both strong and mournful but that sweeps everything in its path, like the wind that blows over the hills and heaths of her native Basque country, harking to myths and legends.

With contrasting raw black and white, she has structured an original visual alphabet, meticulously constructing it over the course of time. We slip into her images as if sucked in by the sensuality of form and matter, yet also by troubled faces and bodies lending themselves to often mysterious rituals dallying with the real and the invented. Is it not photography’s role to disorient us, to take us to hover in frozen time between two shores?” 

Claude Nori, 2022

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VENUE – Villa Lina, Ronciglione, Italy

LODGING & MEALS  see  info on Summer workshops

BIOGRAPHY

Gabrielle Duplantier is a French-American-Azorean photographer, born in 1978. After studying Fine Arts and Art History in Bordeaux and Toulouse, she began to explore on her own the practice of photography. A short stay in Paris inspired her to return to live in the Southwest of France, close to nature. 

Since her first steps in photography, she travels again and again the same familiar places, the Basque Country, Portugal or India. Strange landscapes, twilight moments, powerful and fragile portraits of women or children, Gabrielle pursues the anxious and obstinate affirmation of her point of view as a subject, less attached to freezing reality than to claiming a right to look at it. 

She has published two books with Editions lamaindonne, Volta (2014 and 2021) and Terres basses (2018), and one with Le Bec en l’Air edition, Sète#22 from her Residency in Sète.
Her work is the subject of numerous exhibitions and publications in France and abroad. 

Gabrielle Duplantier is a member of the collective project Temps Zéro.
She is represented by Galerie 127. 

PRACTICAL INFO