"Cévennes black & withe"
Text in "Cévennes au cœur" published by France Sud edition
With the insolence which makes it both enigmatic and great, photography preserves from the void this fragment of intimacy which transforms the surprise of a glance into a moment of universal happiness.
It has the instinct of time!
It belongs to this area of silence where the fulguration of a face or the luminous vibration of a landscape tear man from the blazing night of nothingness.
Thanks to a magic complicity with the photographer, this emotion, sometimes a little stiff, sometimes smiling with life is fixed in a time which only belongs to the photo.
However, confronted with such motionless, random meetings, who has never felt the ambiguous desire to wind up the clockwork of the scene, as thought it was one of the colourful metal toys with their shambling movements which illuminated our childhood, to start it running again? Who never felt mysteriously troubled by the dumb interrogation of a look, and the desire to find out more about the scene's history and the destiny involved? A photograph can stimulate the drama of imagination, giving birth to a story.
When it has the power, the beauty and the distinguished difference called talent which hallmarks the thousands of photographs that Helmut Krackenberger has brought back from his exploration of the Cevennes over the last twenty years, the search for this mystery becomes child's play.
His photographs have a tenderness akin to memory, both upsetting and gentle, which belongs to worlds past, to satisfied nostalgias.
"Cévennes au Cœur" is a book born from this desire to reinvent with words and the total freedom of fiction the destiny of these men, these women and these landscapes which crossed his path one day.