CHAUMONT-SUR-LOIRE.- The La ferme du Garet series (1984), which are some of the photographs exhibited at the Domaine de Chaumont-sur-Loire, occupy a unique, intimate and deeply-rooted place in the work of Raymond Depardon. Today, this testimony to rural life and country folk which gives a voice and face to people and places long considered silent and invisible, is familiar to those who know the work of the great documentary filmmaker. After the publication of this series as a collection in 1995 (Editions Carré, republished by Actes Sud), the trilogy Profils paysans (2001-2008), filmed together with his wife Claudine Nougaret, was published in the 2000s and includes La terre des paysans (Le Seuil, 2008), Paysans (Points, 2009) and more recently Rural (Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art, 2020). In 1984, when Depardon returned, lens in hand, to his childhood farm in Villefranche-sur-Saône, he was in the process of bridging the chasm between his career and his origins, thanks to a commission - the legendary Mission photographique awarded by DATAR (Délégation interministérielle de l’aménagement du territoire et de l’attractivité régionale (Land Development and Regional Action Delegation)).

As commemorated in the exhibition Paysages français. Une aventure photographique. 1984-2017 at the BnF in 2017, twenty-nine photographers were commissioned to “Depict the French landscape of the 1980s”. Originally planned to last just a year, the project eventually lasted five and was managed by Bernard Latarjet and François Hers. The Mission followed in the footsteps of iconic projects in the history of photography such as the 1851 Missions Héliographiques commissioned by the Monuments Historiques or the Farm Security Administration project (1935-1942), which built up a portrait of America during the Great Depression. There was also the New Topographics exhibition shown in 1975 in the United States, which proved to be the turning point which contributed to revisiting the image of the countryside in America by attributing more importance to the everyday and ordinary.

Raphaële Bertho, author of La Mission photographique de la DATAR, Un laboratoire du paysage contemporain (La Documentation française, 2013) and curator with Héloïse Conesa of the BnF exhibition, highlights photography’s dual importance in the field of art and public policy. On the one hand, “The beginning of the 1980s was a turning point for photography as it became incorporated into contemporary art institutions. […] By approaching photographers who were considered artists, and by giving the resulting photographs the status of works of art, DATAR’s photographic Mission actively participated in this process of institutional recognition.” On the other hand, “It was part of a political questioning about the countryside which was expressed in the early 1980s around the notion of landscape”. “Giving photographers the task of rendering intelligible a visually palpable experience while revisiting the perception of the countryside and explicitly asking them to recreate a culture of landscape in France.”

The famous reporter and co-founder in 1966 of the Gamma agency (which he managed from 1973 until his move to Magnum in 1978) and author in 1974 of a first feature film devoted to Giscard’s presidential campaign, was given the opportunity by the DATAR commission to return to his parents’ farm in Villefranche. This personal journey became inextricably entwined with a project of public interest. It is a portrait of his childhood home following the death of his father, whose absence deepens the images. It is a portrait of “A place which can be seen all over France”, and which has witnessed all the changes experienced in the country during the ‘Trente Glorieuses’. “When you are on the A6 motorway, [...] in front of a big shopping area, you can see a group of houses surrounded by acacias for a few seconds. This is the old quarter of Le Garet”, writes Depardon (La Ferme du Garet, 1995). On the one hand, it is a secret garden revealed in confidence - the journal of a return to the land of his birth (especially when the series became a book) which weaves together the portrait of a place with the story of a vocation. On the other hand, it is a sociological, geographical and political document, in which Depardon undertakes, with regard to his sponsors, “To show what you developers have done to my parents’ farm”. He asks himself “Yesterday, it was in the countryside, today it is on the outskirts of the town. And tomorrow?”

About forty years separate us from these images, which is about the same period which separates these images from the Le Garet which Depardon remembers as a child. In both cases, there are changes and elements which remain constant. La Ferme du Garet is neither a nostalgic search for a lost paradise, nor a portrait of a devastated land. It has all the depth of a work of literature. There are few cues in these images, only scattered traces like the words of a poem. Your gaze, deprived of distraction, lingers on the materials - the shine of the oilcloth, the coolness of the tiles, the caress of the crocheted curtains, the warmth of the sun in the corner of the courtyard and the fleeting presence of a shadow (his mother). Your gaze becomes tactile. “I’ve a feeling that I didn’t look. I found it hard to look,” confesses Depardon. “The camera made me look.” The apparent emptiness can in turn teach us how to look. Depardon suggests how - with imagination. “I try to capture the reality before me. Reality is often not very interesting. So, I turn to dreaming!” We can now understand the ever-renewed interest aroused by this antidramatic series which we think we know and which can then be rediscovered again through new hangings and original readings, such as Jacques Rancière’s La Chambre (Atelier EXB) in 2020. La Ferme du Garet tells its tale in Chaumont differently to elsewhere. Each time a small piece of the veil is lifted, and what it all means is never exhausted. The images invite you to observe their silence. Let’s soak it up.