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Subscribe for full access to The Eye of Photography! Thousands of images and articles, documenting the history of photography and its evolution over the past decades, through a unique daily journal.
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Subscribe for full access to The Eye of Photography! Thousands of images and articles, documenting the history of photography and its evolution over the past decades, through a unique daily journal.
Subscribe for full access to The Eye of Photography! Thousands of images and articles, documenting the history of photography and its evolution over the past decades, through a unique daily journal.
Subscribe for full access to The Eye of Photography! Thousands of images and articles, documenting the history of photography and its evolution over the past decades, through a unique daily journal.
Subscribe for full access to The Eye of Photography! Thousands of images and articles, documenting the history of photography and its evolution over the past decades, through a unique daily journal.
Subscribe for full access to The Eye of Photography! Thousands of images and articles, documenting the history of photography and its evolution over the past decades, through a unique daily journal.
Subscribe for full access to The Eye of Photography! Thousands of images and articles, documenting the history of photography and its evolution over the past decades, through a unique daily journal.
Man and sea in South Africa
In his book The Bay published by editions de Juillet, the photographer Benjamin Hoffman takes us to the southern Atlantic Ocean with the fishermen of Cape Town.
"Homme libre toujours tu chériras la mer", wrote Charles Baudelaire. It's true that the sea is always a surprising terrain, full of mysteries, imbued with a form of freedom that we seek both in the moments when we abandon ourselves to it, for example in summer, when we go swimming on sunny beaches, or in our dreams, when we think back to our very distant and obscure marine origins, when we think of any enchanted or tragic event that took place in the waves.
With Benjamin Hoffman, in his book The BayIn this film, we enter into the daily lives of the fishermen of Cape Town, the port city of South Africa. Through the eyes of these fishermen, we see the extent to which the sea is their element, the extent to which these men are one with the water, and the extent to which they abandon themselves to it completely. Benjamin's book raises profound questions about the way our insides are connected to the ocean. As we turn each page, we melt a little more into the salt water, vibrating before every wave and piece of foam.
Green oilskins
Some of the pages are bluish, with that very special atmosphere where the sky sometimes merges with the sea. And then there are all the sea creatures these fishermen encounter: seals, large swordfish, sharks... The panoply of animals and fish that live in the shallows and populate this astonishing book, full of beauty, full of pigment. The colors are so beautiful. A painter's palette.
The fishermen, for example, wear bright green oilskins, and Benjamin Hoffman photographs this green, which bursts forth to reveal the ocean's beautiful colors, which are sometimes a little grayed out and wadded up.
This whole community of fishermen goes far beyond the merely anecdotal, and even if each of them has a particular story to tell, the universal dimension is very much present and highlighted by the subject of the sea, which carries us along just as it does these men, driven out to sea in search of fish.
We could say that we're heading out into the open sea of photography, which is sending us off to find men's adventures, which today are increasingly rare and therefore increasingly extraordinary.
By Jean-Baptiste Gauvin
Benjamin Hoffman: The Bay
July editions
Format: 18.5 x 23.5 cm
Hardcover
104 four-color pages
45 photographs
ISBN : 9782-36510-0861
www.editionsdejuillet.com
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