Far East

Over the course of four autumns, Géraldine Lay photographed Japan. Each year, she found the same white light that makes colours explode. Traveling by train from one spot to another, she gradually drifted away from big cities, seeking a less sensational, perhaps more rugged, daily life and new material, both literally and figuratively.

For her images are brimming with woven threads and textures, from which intense plains of colour emerge here and there. It is difficult not to think of painting. Yet, the photographer, perhaps following in the footsteps of the author of In Praise of Shadows, writer Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, plays with shadow as never before. A strangeness runs through the landscapes and the people within them- something unresolved that nevertheless captures us.

Following connections that are as subtle as they are obvious, the eye navigates from image to image. Four autumns are represented in 50 carefully chosen photographs. They compose both a portrait of Japan, and the tale of a Western photographer’s roaming in the heart of a country where four cubic rocks on the seashore unleash the imagination.