Laurine at the Big G

Fine art inkjet print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag 308g paper with cardboard lamination. Edition n°2 of 6 in this format. Work awarded at the Fine Art Photography Award in 2019. Work sold unframed. 

Gravity shapes and give strength to the human body. Since my early years as a climber and now as an amateur photographer, I wanted to show the genuine (non sexualized) beauty of the human body grappling with the constraint of verticality and the (almost living) organic shapes of sandstone, which is sometimes soft-touch as skin. Whereas sport photography is often about showing performance, nude fine art photography can easily fall down on the cliché of charm. For this nude rock climbing project, I choose models who had no previous experience in rock climbing. They had to deal with the very few moving possibilities offered by the climbing holds, whose three-dimensional disposition is similar to a syntactical framework where you have to find the path to the least effort, which in climbing is the way to Beauty. Composing with their body limits, lack of strength and even sometime lack of balance, they progressively forget about the mental conditioning of posing nude and discovered a personal way to dance with the rock. All pictures were taken in famous routes that have been climbed by generations of climbers and that are renowned for years, all in the forest of Fontainebleau (France) which is one of the very few places in Europe where rock climbing started to be a sport at the end of the 19th Century. But as an other constraint to expand my liberty, I light-shaped the sandstone with studio strobes, trying to make it alive and escaping from the accurate representation of reality. And as in a dream, the pictures came. Here, Laurine is starting a route graded 7a and called the "Big G" at Franchard Raymond.