Wave of Dream photobook (2nd edition)

Description

It emanates a singular fragility of the images gathered in this book; they seem to be bathed in a soft, almost silent silence. We dive into a universe on the borderline between dream and reality, in a dialogue between vegetation sometimes soft and sometimes pungent, and distant portraits borrowed from intense inner reflection.

It is only surreptitiously, by the rustling of foliage disturbed by a mischievous human presence, or by the heavy and slow step, almost immobile, of a crocodile wandering alone on the shore that we are brought back to real life. Ordinary pieces of nature are transformed, through the eyes of the photographer, in extraordinary and remarkable particularities. Paying attention to details, detecting magic moments, is the intention of Maria Baoli.

Page after page, it takes us into its “wave of dream”, a kind of back and forth where body parts are prolonged by instants of grandiose nature: lips that metamorphose into flower with suggestive beauty, a belly which is torn in tortuous roots. The animals do not escape the wave: the portrait of an elephant majestically lying on the flagstones, between shadow and light, succumbing to the hose pleasure. The height of melancholy, its trunk coiled on itself, like the most reassuring setting of the universe.

Encompassed by vast landscapes offering moments of breathing to this network of nature and human forms, the book combines color photography with black and white photography, cyanotype, and collage. All the images are timeless, purposely put together by the photographer, walking on a delicate turn of domestic research as to our place in the world and our relationship to nature.