Lucas Olivet

True «huis-clos» around a lake, this series is located in Canada. A frequent visitor, I obsessively go every summer and, year after year, I keep taking pictures around the woods and water: a long distance relationship with a place where you find yourself living simply, peacefully, to the rhythm of the sun. Where you don’t rush around and where, whether you want to be or not, you become a watcher, keenly aware of your own individuality surrounded by wildlife and forest: «to see without being seen» like a hunter.

Through a penetrating light, I seek to pay tribute to this wilderness, to detect traces of movement. Photographed from the shore or inside a canoe, these images are the result of patient work. The pictures are focusing on being sober and intimate. They take us into this relaxing macro-landscape, bathed in sunshine and accompanied by such a slow rythm that it gives us the impression to be out of time, not from this world.

For «Black Water Ballad», I’ve been influenced by John Gossage, famous photographer of «The Pond». Its purpose is to reveal the secret beauty of the place without going into lyricism, but the feeling to belong to something. Also Alfred Stieglitz for his long term series at Lake George where he started a type of photography more spontaneous than he would have done in the city.

«Black Water Ballad»comes after «Wentworth» an evolving project around the Laurentian countryside.

Note on the origin of this work:

Once after one of his lecture, Paul Graham hoped for me, from a master to a fan to have always a good light.
 It sounds pretty religious or already accurate for a photographer you would say. I prefer just a good old british positivism about the weather. This might sound weird but after this small talk I looked at the first time the sun in my viewfinder carefully. First it gave me chills and secondly the idea that photography was less a matter of refusing than accepting possibilities.
Well, thank you Paul.