As Aurore Bagarry made her way, on the French side of the Channel, from Calais to Brest, by way of Varangéville, the Le Hoc promontory, Cap Levi in the Cotentin, and several small towns in Finisterre and the Côtes d’Armor, she photographed a landscape at “point blank range”, to use a phrase that may explain the notion of the photographic shot, but which also expresses the sensation of brutal presence felt when you look at these pictures. In England, on the northern shores of the Channel, the artist likewise journeyed westward along the coast, starting from Southampton and ending up at the Lizard, at the tip of Cornwall, and then, having reached the end of the peninsula, made her way back by way of Maer Cliff near Bude, to the northwest of Dartmoor National Park, facing Wales.
What we see here is indeterminate, and has as much to do with topographical survey as with landscape photography. Very little sky, or even no sky at all in these images which it is almost impossible to situate, if you have not located on a map the place where the photos were taken. Whether you are in France or on the other side of the Channel, nothing helps you to really understand it.
The coast thus seems like a gigantic palette on which the sea has tested its colours: mauves marry the yellows and greens of chlorophyll and mud mixed together, sickly ochres bud from dwarf bushes, greys notched by bluish hollows seem to bow beneath the force of winds, dark sandstones streaked with pink stand out against the grey sky, cliffs display the crenellated shapes of their white walls stripped by salt, their turrets surmounted by low grass, sometimes spotted with dark lichen, or streaked with vertical stripes made by trickling water.