How to photograph what is missing

with Ellen Turner Hall

Là où se loge la manqué -The black and white photographs of Charlotte Auricombe are currently on exhibit at the Lumière d’Encre gallery in Céret.  A difficult concept Where lack resides.  Yet Auricombe’s haunting images  resonate within us.

Expressing in words what she  seems to do so effortlessly in her pictures, Auricombe  compares   lack  to “a silent echo that fades then reappears constantly in landscapes, places, bodies around us, and reveals the trace of everything that stays regardless of what disappears.”

Who knew that there were so many nuances  of light and textures  on rockfaces? You can almost reach out and feel the loose stones sliding downhill.  On the shoreline, where sea meets beach, the multitude of liquid blacks animate the sea while the light bouncing off pebbles  transforms them into shining stars against an evening sky.

Auricombe’s lens focuses our attention on a subject as if it were the only one in the universe: a hand on  naked  skin, white birches dancing in long grass,  a boulder with 1000 years of history engraved on its surface, ghostly  roofs with angled antenna  under an uncertain sky.

My favourite is something that resembles an eye until you realise it is a swirl of sheets as seen through what appears to be a steamy window with  lines of condensation trickling down.

In another rock study Auricombe takes as her subject Nature’s crosshatching. The rockface tells the history of the  chaotic clash of primitive forces pulling in every direction before settling and solidifying into its present shape.

The artist has  set herself the challenge of   photographing what is missing. Go to Ceret. Look at the photographs. And decide for yourself whether she has succeeded.

The exhibit runs  until 14 March. Opening hours are Tuesday to Saturday, 10h-13h and 14h-18h.