Photo Esplanade – Romano Riedo
Alpland
For the first edition of Photo Esplanade, a new open-air event dedicated to contemporary photography, Gruyères Castle presents the work of Romano P. Riedo. Exhibited in the heart of an exceptional panorama, the Fribourg-born photographer's images take a sensitive look at the work of mountain farmers.
Painstakingly produced over decades and in different regions of Switzerland, the series entitled Alpland shows the harshness and simplicity of a life dedicated to toil in a grandiose and sometimes untamable mountain environment. While working the land and raising livestock are ancestral practices, the artist always shows the advent of modernity and the transformations it involves.
Exhibition curator
Filipe Dos Santos
Vernissage
Vendredi 1er avril, 18h
An ode to hard work and tradition?
In Alpland, Romano P. Riedo brings together images from various series devoted to the work of mountain farmers. Meticulously captured in the Swiss Alps over several decades, his photographies are a touching testimony to the lives of those who live from and with the mountains. In these snapshots, wheat mowers, cattle breeders and cheesemakers toil day after day to make the most of territories that are often very unkind to them.
An ode to hard work and tradition? By inscribing his images in contemporary times, which sometimes emerge at the turn of a detail, the photographer demonstrates a vision that is the antithesis of idealism. Although echoing a repertoire once used to glorify Swiss origins and identity, these images resolutely bear the imprint of today's world. The mountain farmers captured here are those of today, even if their work is very similar to that of their forebears.
Romano P. Riedo's humanistic approach focuses on the description of gestures, intergenerational transmission and relationships between community members. Mutual aid at harvest time, gatherings around the table and religious celebrations punctuate the calendar, repeating themselves day after day, week after week. Using timeless black and white, the artist seems above all to focus on the simplicity of the lives captured, lives that are sublimated not only by the grandiose, terrifying alpine landscapes, but also by the photographer's eye, which captures their essence with sensitivity.
Exhibition views
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