Refuge

Refuge is the sixth book by Lara Gasparotto and spans four years of daily photographic practice, in the artist’s immediate environment but also much further away, as far as Guyana, via Quebec and Louisiana. More than a practice, it is rather a way of looking at the world that drives Lara Gasparotto. A world of outdoors, of flora, fauna, rain, sun, lakes, trees, and her family. Gasparotto spent a winter and a spring working on the selection for this book. In the end, Refuge delivers a subtle narration without chapters, without page numbers, and where the rhythm is changing. On the cover is an illustration by her sister Lissa Gasparotto and inside a poetic text by Eva Mancuso. The 200 images are a little more than strictly photography: intuitive and nourished by painting, Gasparotto seeks with pastel, gouache, sometimes even oil, tenuous elements of her photos that she modifies, enhances, underlines and then rephotographs to finally, very subtly, move the image from the mechanical and the chemical to the fleeting expressiveness of the living. Text in French.