Correspondances

A residence in the bay of Mont-Saint-Michel

Correspondence is the result of a photographic residency in the land of the Bay of Mont-Saint-Michel. For nine months, Richard Volante met women and men living in this area, questioning them about their lives and the relationship they have with the landscape..

He listened to them, then photographed them.

Their portraits without artifice show the sincerity and the frontality of the meetings. Each person entrusted the photographer with a precious place to which they were particularly attached; breathtaking panoramas off the tourist routes, a hut by the water, a cave, hundred-year-old trees…
The paths taken are often cross roads.

By photographing landscapes with a pinhole camera, Richard Volante wanted to convey this certainty of passing time, intimately linked to man and to the setting of his life. It is a moving photograph that he offers us; a fragile image that tames light and wind. The cliché does not freeze the precise moment but continues to bring it to life in a constantly changing world.ion.

Correspondence is the tenuous relationship between women, men and affection
that they have with their countries. What they like to see, breathe, experience. This reassures them, but also worries them, in their difficulties to calmly see the inevitable transformations of their environment.t.

During his residency, Richard Volante transmitted his images to Michel Onfray. Correspondences, these are also the words posed by the philosopher on what he saw of the poetry of the photographer..

THE AUTHORS

Michel Onfray, philosopher and writer
Born in Argentan Orne, Michel Onfray obtained a doctorate in philosophy in 1986 from the University of Caen. He taught in the final year of the technical high school in Caen, then resigned from the National Education in 2002. Supporter of a collective education which he wanted libertarian and free, Michel Onfray founded in 2002 the Popular University of Caen in order to teach a counter-history of philosophy. Michel Onfray is the author of numerous works in which he develops a theory of lhedonism. He proposes to reconcile man with his body, a sensual machine and to build an ethics based on aesthetics. For him, philosophy is like an art of living, of living better, which allows us to get rid of our illusions.ses illusions.

Richard Volante, photographer and videographer
For many years, Richard Volante has been leading a visible reflection in his work. What is the nature of the tenuous links between the dreamed image, the manufactured image and the shared image? In this project, he associates a temporal dimension, inspired by the movement of the tides which cover and discover the changing landscapes of the bay. He wishes to register his research to reveal all the richness of the territory in a peregrination, as the miquelots roamed the Mons roads long before him. An approach that leads today to meet the inhabitants of the territory of the Bay of Mont-Saint-Michel.ichel.

The preface is signed by Xavier Bailly, chief administrator of the Abbey of Mont-Saint-Michel..

 This project is an initiative ofWings of Caius

Press kit d'Images in the Bay