{"id":358,"date":"2026-04-29T12:56:25","date_gmt":"2026-04-29T16:56:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.normandrajotte.com\/en\/?page_id=358"},"modified":"2026-06-04T12:09:31","modified_gmt":"2026-06-04T16:09:31","slug":"ghosts-in-the-landscape-by-jennifer-couelle-2004","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.normandrajotte.com\/en\/ghosts-in-the-landscape-by-jennifer-couelle-2004\/","title":{"rendered":"Ghosts in the Landscape \u2013 By Jennifer Cou\u00eblle (2004)"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"wpb-content-wrapper\"><div id=\"tdi_1\" class=\"tdc-row\"><div class=\"vc_row tdi_2  wpb_row td-pb-row\" >\n<style scoped>\n\/* custom css - generated by TagDiv Composer *\/\n\n\/* custom css - generated by TagDiv Composer *\/\n.tdi_2,\r\n                .tdi_2 .tdc-columns{\r\n                    min-height: 0;\r\n                }.tdi_2,\r\n\t\t\t\t.tdi_2 .tdc-columns{\r\n\t\t\t\t    display: block;\r\n\t\t\t\t}.tdi_2 .tdc-columns{\r\n\t\t\t\t    width: 100%;\r\n\t\t\t\t}.tdi_2:before,\r\n\t\t\t\t.tdi_2:after{\r\n\t\t\t\t    display: table;\r\n\t\t\t\t}\n<\/style><div class=\"vc_column tdi_4  wpb_column vc_column_container tdc-column td-pb-span12\">\n<style scoped>\n\/* custom css - generated by TagDiv Composer *\/\n\n\/* custom css - generated by TagDiv Composer *\/\n.tdi_4{\r\n                    vertical-align: baseline;\r\n                }.tdi_4 > .wpb_wrapper,\r\n\t\t\t\t.tdi_4 > .wpb_wrapper > .tdc-elements{\r\n\t\t\t\t    display: block;\r\n\t\t\t\t}.tdi_4 > .wpb_wrapper > .tdc-elements{\r\n\t\t\t\t    width: 100%;\r\n\t\t\t\t}.tdi_4 > .wpb_wrapper > .vc_row_inner{\r\n\t\t\t\t    width: auto;\r\n\t\t\t\t}.tdi_4 > .wpb_wrapper{\r\n\t\t\t\t    width: auto;\r\n\t\t\t\t    height: auto;\r\n\t\t\t\t}\n<\/style><div class=\"wpb_wrapper\" >[vc_column_text css=\u00a0\u00bb\u00a0\u00bb]\r\n<h3><strong>Ghosts in the Landscape \u2013 By Jennifer Cou\u00eblle (2004)<\/strong><\/h3>\r\nPreface to the book Marcher sa trace\/ Walking in my Footprint\r\n\r\nMystery. It floats in Normand Rajotte\u2019s images, silent, barely visible, like an enigma that hopes to remain unanswered. And it is preserved in Rajotte\u2019s nature photographs, leaving never more than a sense of things. It is the tranquil expression of evidence that refuses to be understood. To reveal itself would be to fade away. And so it finds a way to be without being too apparent. Its presence is modest. And that\u2019s enough.\r\n\r\nThis small bit, these photographs seem to say, is a great deal. They act as if they know: their tight framings make precise cuts. It is a little as if they are taking our gaze by the hand to direct it better, and because our gaze is myopic, they invite us to approach, to contemplate from close up the sites that have been swept by these mysteries. They leave in their wake traces, impressions, sometimes even an aura \u2013 so many lures for a photographer who likes to furrow through parcels of territory, to follow watercourses and animal trails, to stride over weeds and branches, to literally insert himself into the landscape to discover the buried face of the forest, the hill, the shoreline, the wasteland . . . places without names.\r\n\r\nNormand Rajotte is one of a surprisingly small number of Quebec artists currently associated with landscape photography \u2013 with the genre, it is understood. Specifically, after starting in documentary in the late 1970s, he refocused his rather direct approach onto the subject of \u201clandscape.\u201d He takes pictures not so much of landscapes as of the land. What he captures on film are \u201clittle\u201d landscapes, lands that are very ordinary a priori, sites that, since 1983 \u2013 the year in which he began to visit the countryside constantly in his own fashion \u2013 have gradually come to be \u201canti-landscapes,\u201d like fragments of nature released from the accepted conception of a landscape aesthetic. That is, a country \u201cmade into art.\u201d\r\n\r\nThis construction \u2013 for that is what it is \u2013 is, above all, mental. It involves our perception of both what is inherent to the landscape and its subsequent representation. The former may recall a particular misty sky or a particular bucolic expanse in a particular work of art, for example, and the latter helps to reinforce this phenomenon of recognition of the familiar \u2013 a synonym here for beauty \u2013 of what we easily conceive of as a \u201cbeautiful landscape\u201d: Mont Sainte-Victoire, which C\u00e9zanne appropriated, for instance; the milky blue of a sky that immediately reminds us of Canaletto\u2019s scenes; small, skinny trees rising naked in the snow, which one would swear were plucked from a Bruegel landscape; the grandiose gorges and peaks of the American West captured forever by Ansel Adams\u2019s panoramic vision; or the gentle melancholy of a road bordered by poplars readily recalling Cartier-Bresson\u2019s sketched image of Brie. Exalted by painters and photographers, these landscapes and their motifs are now legitimated by the collective memory.\r\n\r\nIn this regard, Rajotte feels that \u201cif we love the European landscape so much, it is because it is culturally connoted by the impressive number of painters and photographs who have portrayed it. We have a habit of liking things because they remind us of something else.\u201d In Quebec, where, \u201cwith few exceptions, the countryside has not yet been domesticated by artists,\u201d we apparently have few comparisons. We will need a little more time before looking at an image of Laurentian underbrush makes us feel emotion not for the play of light on its carpet of moss, but because it reminds us of a particular work or a particular chapter in art history that has already represented it.\r\n\r\nThe present selection of landscapes, photographs both in black and white and in colour, most taken in Quebec, but some also in Spain and New Mexico, takes us straight to the heart of the matter: among the pine needles carpeting the invisible soil, among the weeds growing on the walls of an eroding plateau, in humid earth marked momentarily by the insistent passage of ten fingers, in the concentric circles of foam at the surface of a watercourse whose flow is impeded by branches. As mysterious as they are, these works seem to speak to us of the ineluctable \u2013 of matter that survives time, challenges it, but that nevertheless bears stigmata: of the presence of what no longer exists; of absence; of the invisible; of the inexplicable, but always in relation to the certainty of materiality. In this sense, these images fit with the more material reflection on the notion of landscape offered by the painter and philosopher Anne Cauquelin: \u201cThe landscape is not a metaphor for nature, a manner of evoking it; rather, it really is nature. [It] contributes to the eternity of nature, an always already there, before humans, and no doubt after them. In a word, the landscape is a substance. . . . \u201d\r\n\r\nIndeterminate, caught in close-up, most often in high-angle shots that seem to flatten and obscure the relationships of scale, the sites probed by this artist\u2019s lens are stripped of reference points, have no horizon. The eye does not wander in them, it stops in them \u2013 forced to take in the material opacity of these restricted worlds traversed by presences and marked with imprints, led to recognize the more or less metaphysical intentions behind this photographic activity. For it is difficult, in effect, not to sense the ghostly climate of these images of muddy water and cracked earth, displaying both signs of life and the passage of time that, little by little, erases memory. Similarly, we perceive mystery in photographs of stretches of water disturbed by something we cannot see, beyond the frame, in another space-time. The strangeness persists as we look at the innumerable atmospheric effects and light reflections: here, bringing clouds into the same plane as a pool of water that seems to boil up and mimics them in its turn; there, creating a column of white smoke rising from arid ground, where a spherical trace seems to signal the presence of a mountain, here silhouetted against the sky.\r\n\r\nAs we look at Rajotte\u2019s works, we do not always know what we are looking at, but we certainly feel what we see. We do not know, for example, that the white spray of water falling against dense vegetation is the result of a quick shot after the artist threw a mass of water \u2013 one of his rare interventions. But we do feel the effect of suddenness, as well as the intriguing anomaly created by the introduction of this stain of rain into an otherwise comprehensible environment. It is similar for the diagonal symmetry: the irregular strip crossing a sluggish stream remains a mystery for those who do not know that it owes its shape to a mound of pollen fractured by a deer that came through here.\r\n\r\nIf there is mystery in these images, in which we think that we may see masks and faces in the stones and darkened basins or recognize a body huddled in barely melted water, where three butterflies sitting on a soiled rock have so strong a presence that we would not be surprised to hear them speak \u2013 such mystery is not due to the subjects alone. Definitely not. The enigmatic, even surreal, quality that these photographs contain is also attributable largely to the precision and patience of the artist\u2019s approach.\r\n\r\nRajotte domesticates the territories that he photographs. He visits them regularly. He explores their topography, down to the smallest recesses and tangles; he becomes a privileged witness to their evolution, to the advances of their vegetation. His attention is sustained, concentrated. The familiarity to which this experience gives him access offers, in its turn, the potential to contemplate, to observe his subjects in a relaxed state of mind. And \u201cwhen the mind is relaxed, sensorial receptivity and acuity are increased.\u201d It is no doubt this state of mind that inspires the meditative quality of these images: their simple composition, sometimes almost to the point of abstraction, and their colours, never more than organic, lead to calm. It is no doubt this attention to the experience that precedes the genesis of these \u201cliving landscapes,\u201d paired with an apparently impeccable technical skill, that confers upon them a rich rendering of intensity, clarity, and spareness. It is no doubt something delicate in this artist\u2019s eye that banishes heaviness and oppression. Although dark, these photographs breathe. Although consciously designed, they do not need support. Although awash in mystery, they are not ferocious: on the contrary, they are easy to approach. They give the impression of simply observing. The irrefutable. That nature is the ultimate host to our existence. Past, present, future. The attraction is great. Rajotte\u2019s constantly renewed pilgrimages become coherent acts. Eminently human.[\/vc_column_text]<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"[vc_column_text css=\"\"] Ghosts in the Landscape \u2013 By Jennifer Cou\u00eblle (2004) Preface to the book Marcher sa trace\/ Walking in my Footprint Mystery. It floats in Normand Rajotte\u2019s images, silent, barely visible, like an enigma that hopes to remain unanswered. And it is preserved in Rajotte\u2019s nature photographs, leaving never more than a sense of [...]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-358","page","type-page","status-publish"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.normandrajotte.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/358","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.normandrajotte.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.normandrajotte.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.normandrajotte.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.normandrajotte.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=358"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.normandrajotte.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/358\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":467,"href":"https:\/\/www.normandrajotte.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/358\/revisions\/467"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.normandrajotte.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=358"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}