Böcker av Geraldine Lay

For four autumns, Géraldine Lay photographed Japan. Each year, she found the same white light that makes the colours burst. Travelling by train from one point to another, she gradually moved away from the big cities, in search of a less spectacular daily life, more rugged perhaps, and in search of new material, both literally and figuratively. For her images abound in wefts and textures, from which emerge here and there intense flats of colour. It is difficult not to think of painting. However, the photographer, perhaps following in the footsteps of the author of In Praise of Shadows, the writer Jun'ichir? Tanizaki, plays with the shadow as never before. A strangeness runs through the landscapes as well as through his characters-something unresolved that catches us. Through correspondences that are as subtle as they are obvious, the viewer's eye wanders from image to image. From the four autumns, 50 pictures have been carefully selected. They make up a portrait of Japan, the story of a Western photographer's itinerary in the heart of a country where four cubic rocks by the sea unleash an entire imaginary universe.

After Failles Ordinaires (2012) which revealed Géraldine Lay's keen eye and original talent, the photographer here continues her urban explorations of humanity in Great Britain. Faithful to her precise, detailed method and ever attentive to the potential for surprise and chance in any setting, Géraldine Lay mentally apprehends her territories before photographing them. She senses the light and atmosphere, immersing herself in a setting rather than reconnoitring, an approach that brings intimacy to the heart of anonymity. Some critics have rightly highlighted the cinematographic dimension of the artist's work but such an interpretation overlooks the essentially photographic nature of her pursuit and, in each of her 'photograms', her exacting work reminds us how photography was invented before cinema, and had a special ability to capture and hold the delicately ephemeral. In doing so, she creates a new aesthetic unique to the photographic craft, an aesthetic that imbues all of her work. As we traverse suburban streets and squares, lives are captured in the mystery of their daily existence. As the Irish writer, Robert McLiam Wilson writes, 'People walk and wait. They talk, drink coffee. They cross streets. They work. They move about. Citizens busy with citizen things. Like all citizens everywhere, they are multiple, varied, various. Men, women, children. They are also British. Incredibly British. They couldn't come from anywhere else.' In an age of exponential standardized universality, Géraldine Lay's photography reaffirms both the permanence of unusual individualities and the resistance of collective identities.