The sound of snow

There are artists who regularly return to their craft, limiting their field of vision with the aim of highlighting the diversity of nuances that compose it. Photographers who work outdoors—landscape photographers such as Catherine Henriette—cannot physically intervene in the subject: it is given to them. However, they can experiment with different angles or wait patiently for the moment when light and colour will shape the landscape in a new way.
There is no need to scatter your focus: for those who know how to observe it, the landscape invites contemplation of its riches and its many subtle variations. After an initial visit in 2023, Catherine Henriette decided to return several times to the same region of Hokkaidō, in the far north of Japan, more precisely to Wakkanai, the terminus of a railway line, near Cape Sōya. It is a coastline where no one really wants to go in the middle of winter because of the harsh climate, strong winds, intense cold, short days and scarce light; but, being familiar with stays at high altitudes in the Pyrenean mountains, such conditions did not deter her. The stormy climate in this part of Japan gave her the opportunity to confront a landscape that lends itself to multiple visual interpretations. And it is within a small area, during the few hours of daylight at midday, that she finds material to photograph.

There is little or no sign of life or movement, except for the flight of a few crows, whose black silhouettes appear like graphic punctuation marks in her viewfinder. The place is deserted by fishermen, the fish factories closed: a few boats, frozen in the landscape and largely covered with snow, emerge from the mist like ghosts. The clouds, the low sky, the snowflakes carried by the wind that sometimes form a screen, and a grey sea in the distance fill the frame of the image. Some plants, a few stalks of reeds or dried sunflower flowers, resist and emerge from the snow dunes; they draw timid strokes of colour contrasting with a palette of tones that unfolds mainly between white and grey. Sometimes, during the day, there is a break in the clouds, the sun tries to pierce the cloud cover and the atmosphere is transformed.

Catherine Henriette's photography stands out for its subtle visual qualities and the sensations it evokes: emptiness, a world at a standstill, enveloped in silence, allowing us to imagine what the sound of snow might be like. This is an opportunity for everyone, as Charles Juliet wrote, to measure themselves ‘against a formidable face to face’, inviting us to ‘enlarge our inner space’.

Gabriel Bauret