ISABELLE LEMERCIER-BRÉHAT
In Gallo Country
Series of photographs taken in the Pays Gallo region, a Breton land where time seems to waver between endurance and disappearance.
Travelling through the landscapes where her father grew up, Isabelle Lemercier-Bréhat unfolds, through her photographs, an intimate geography imbued with a subtle nostalgia: that of pollarded oaks, shaped by the seasons and by age-old practices; of calvaries whose stone silhouettes rise in a silence laden with memory; of old straw-and-earth houses with weathered façades; of garages from another era. American cars, remnants of an imported dream, stand alongside the signs of bars and restaurants that, in their own way, reenact a fantasized America—an influence that remains pervasive even in these rural territories.
What endures in the solitude of fields and abandoned houses is a poetry of decline, a fragile beauty woven from traces and survivals. Set against these human vestiges, nature remains constant: luminous, enduring, and indifferent to the passage of time. Between a remembered past and an uncertain present, these images capture a world threatened with disappearance—yet still profoundly alive.