Intercultural lenses: Luberon
The Luberon mountain region, situated in Southern France southeast of Avignon, is a Regional Natural Park, and, in 1998 was designated as a Unesco Biosphere Reserve. The landscape here has been beautifully fashioned by generations of agricultural work. Below the mountain ridges the cultivated fields are small, nestled into available space on uneven terrain and terraces which, over the generations, were carved into the hills and supported with stonewalls by farmers, or paysans, people of the land.
Panorama, the Cultivated valley, from Lacoste toward Bonnieux (April 2011)
Lacoste toward the Valley (April 1991)
View from Lacoste to the valley, Autumn
A number of the Luberon villages are located on the top of hills and plateaus, with alternating terrace, forest, and rocky areas constituting the slopes down to more fertile valley areas.
Lacoste, near sunrise (2004)
Bonnieux, Autumn (2020)
Goult (2012)
On expanses of more level land, patchworks of cultivated fields manifest a wide variety of crops, colors, and forms, all of which change with the seasons.
When first arriving in this area over 40 years ago, I was struck by this landscape. I wondered, can we consider the farmers in a way as artists, and is their landscape somehow a form of art? Since then, I’ve been exploring this question. My photographs are part of the eyes and ears through which to see and listen.
I have been especially fortunate to be friends with some traditional farming families. Getting to know them, and their work on the land, confirmed my initial sense that the beauty of the landscape stems partly from its being imbued with these people’s human values, their modesty, stamina, and sense of sharing with others in their community.
“Entraide”, Teamwork; helping each other with work on the land.
Lucien watering green peppers by gentle slope,
(1979) Patience
Digging the furrow in the earth for slope irrigation, (1979)
Handling the green peppers; precision, delicate and tender handling, in the work on the land
4 dogs, for truffle hunting, sheep herding, and hunting
My photos honor these people, with whom I learned the importance of working outdoors, of spending days on end under the sky, there to see the unexpected moments of light, the ever-changing colors and forms, unfolding throughout the seasons.
Young Cherry Orchard, Working the Earth, near Lacoste, (April 2005)
What is especially inspiring is that the work of the farmers is not only an act of creation, but of “co-creation”; they create with the seasons, the land, even in a sense with ancestors, who have left their imprint on the land and transmitted their knowledge and their gestures to today's farmer heirs.
Vineyard, Cherry Blossoms, Shadow (1996)
Beyond documentation, the photos highlight a quality of beauty and of art in the landscape, capturing special moments such as the light of dawn, sunset, forms rising above mist, or clouds after a storm.
Poplar, mist and Luberon, (Nov. 2002)
Sunset, Lacoste
Lacoste floating, Ventoux Mountain, (Feb. 1985)
Strange cloud above Lacoste, (July 2019)
For years my photos have focused on the landscape around and between the two perched villages of Lacoste and Bonnieux, thus on the “coteaux”, or partially terraced area between the Luberon mountain ridge and the more level plain. In 2010 the Parc du Luberon did an exhibit of my photos of the landscape between these two villages, considering it as “emblematic” of the Luberon; this was part of an initiative to ensure the continuing of this area’s special beauty and its. agricultural tradition. The title was: “Quels Paysages pour Demain (What Landscapes for Tomorrow?”)
One basic element of the cultivated landscape is lines, the lines of crops, trees, and vineyards, along with the paths and small farm roads which weave to and through these. Photos present this theme in a variety of contexts. In one series (photos Field of Asparagus) we see a Field of Asparagus starting from early Spring, when the “asparagus banks” are created, by plowing up mounds of earth in rows. Farmers then dig into these mounds to harvest the asparagus. In the summer the asparagus plants send up a bushy green growth, which in the autumn turns yellow orange and coppery colors. In winter we see the lines faintly visible under snow. Seeing these various kinds of lines in composition with other elements is basic to appreciating the quality of art in the landscape – and to appreciating the year-round work which goes into that art...
From a young age I was eager to get to know cultures and people’s ways of life other than those of my own United States background. I’ve been especially interested in landscapes where people live close to the land and to their natural environment; this has sometimes been in fairly remote rural settings. In China, Greece, and India, for example, as well as when teaching art for years in the American Art program (See “Teaching”) situated in the Luberon, art and photography have been a primary vehicle in my getting closer to these other ways of life and landscapes, and in “sharing in meaning” with these other people. In the work of as the anthropologist Redfield, one reads of how a person who lives on and cultivates the land may experience the land as an “extension of oneself”; through friendship with the Luberon farming families, I could experience the reality of this. This grounding in an anthropological dialogue both underlies and nourishes my work, differentiating it from being simply a search for “pretty pictures”.
I also value landscape as a catalyst and context for creative thinking and awakened senses. Walking through a structured landscape such as the Luberon, we can be stunned not only by the aesthetic and intercultural richness, but also by the cognitive challenge: different views have intriguing correspondences, echoes of shapes and forms, geometric patterns, interwoven levels. Along with the sky’s -- and our mind’s -- infinite variations, this context called for taking multiple photos of the same place, from varying angles, over time.
Bonnieux, cherry trees in bloom, (April 2000)
Bonnieux, snow, at sunset, (Nov. 1999)
Altogether, this situation, this landscape, was the springboard for my thinking differently about art and language, and developing my specific “Art as Visual Language” approach. In turn, some of the “working concepts” of the Visual Language are engendered and informed by qualities of life experience sometimes elusive to put into words; for example, the extending of one’s drawn calligraphic lines to create the organic network of the “Basic-Format” has in part to do with the sense of self as “extended into the land.” Or, the “Basic-Format Carved as an Anatomical Block”, has to do with the physical, corporeal involvement of the farmers in their work, as well as with one’s own physical “walks” in the landscape, and one’s attunement to senses other than only visual….
Inversely, I regard landscape as like a language, with its lines, structures, echoes, and meanings. In my lectures and publications my photos invite people to consider this, where landscape then becomes a bridge for conveying a sense of yet other “languages”, such as, the language of science, the variegated forms of the Luberon landscape offering, for example, an analogy for visualizing molecular structures. Or one might awaken an affinity for writing systems other than our alphabetic language family, such as Chinese, with its ideograms and their age-old pictographic origins.
Cover of “Archipal”, (2014)
Cover photo on “Le Pays d’Apt”, (2012)
Exploring such an affinity myself led to having several trips to China and Ethnic Minority areas there.
At first, my photos were black and white, and my involvement in color was in painting and drawing, working in "plein air". Several factors led to working with color slides. Contact with the Luberon landscape offered such a continually changing spectacle of subtle nuance and dramatic effects. And, knowing people who work the land, with an astute appreciation of color and light, underlined the importance of working in color, toward reflecting and sharing what both they and I were seeing. Inspiration also came through contact with persons special in the area of color photography, for example, Ernst Haas and Edwin Land. Many of the photos here on this site are from slides, and some are digital. Some of the black and white work involved superimpositions of more than one negative.
Lucien Adrian with sheep
Over the years, I’ve done photographic work for organizations concerned with landscape preservation and cultural heritage, as part of the effort to support the survival of small farms, the perched villages, and landscape settings, as well as Nature (see Conservation)
©Crystal Woodward