Daniel Challe

Daniel Challe was born in 1961. He lives in Brittany. His work is rooted in the exploration of territories which he has enjoyed travelling round and exploring for several years. So the Journal de campagne en Matheysine, a black and white series which he devised between 1993 and 1996, echoing Francis Ponge’s poem La fabrique du pré, was the matrix for his work shedding light on themes to which he is forever reverting: our relation to Nature, the memory of landscapes, figure and place, the space of the book of photographs and the book of poems, the garden, the mountain, the river, the figure of the child, and the brotherhood of trees. He recently decided to slow things down a little more by exploring the landscapes of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Paysages de l’âme, Jean-Jacques Rousseau dans la Nature, published by Diaphane) and his groundbreaking way of looking at Nature. As a disciple of a slow, attentive photography, constructed to the pace of the walk, he now works essentially with a large format 4 x 5 inch box camera (silver photography) to fix the memory of places and people in territories often abandoned by representation and ignored by the ever faster circulation of images.