A Certain Nature: after Giverny, Jean Gaumy

In the book A Certain Nature, after Giverny, Jean Gaumy offers an original vision of painter Claude Monet's world-famous garden. Over the seasons, he has intensified his formal research into plants, creating black-and-white compositions that border on the painterly and the abstract.

A place of artistic fascination for over a century, the garden of painter Claude Monet (1840-1926) in Giverny is today one of the most emblematic sites of French cultural heritage, with its famous water lily pond, immortalized in the paintings of the Impressionist master. It was in this setting, steeped in history and beauty, that the great Magnum photographer chose to cast his eye. Benefiting from privileged access to the garden as a member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts (French Fine Arts Academy), he has turned it into a veritable laboratory for photographic experimentation over several years (from 2016 to 2024). As a keen observer of nature, armed with his iPhone, he develops a singular approach, somewhere between abstraction and naturalism, scientific sensitivity and visual poetry.

In this book, Jean Gaumy explores the richness of plants, their structures, rhythms and almost microscopic details. Through the alleys of Giverny, Gaumy not only photographs a place, he also retraces the thread of his memories and tells us a story: that of his childhood, marked by the simple joy of a family garden, a place of discovery and reverie, to which he tries to bring back to life through these images. An essay by Jean-Christophe Bailly examines Jean Gaumy's “photographic decisions” in relation to the collective imagination surrounding Giverny, and completes the book.