Ruben
Brulat,
born in 1988, Laudun, France, photographer.
After
going for a month to India, a few weeks in Patagonia, and a few in
Nepal, the idea grew in 24-year-old Ruben Brulat‘s mind to go for a
long and unstopped journey, an aesthetic travel, leaving from Gare de
Lyon, Paris. Brulat decided to go East. From Europe to Asia by land
only, through Iraq, Iran, onto Afghanistan, Tibet until Indonesia,
Japan and Mongolia. Inspired by his first trips, Brulat realised that
he wanted to see and share the experience of giving yourself away to
nature in a photography-project. Early january 2011 the Frenchman
asked the first person to pose naked in a landscape for him to
photograph, trying to create a symbiosis with the surroundings. Last
September Brulat succeeded in finding funds to release a beautiful
self published book of this series of photographs taken all over the
world which was named Sharing Paths.
Brulat
sought a new challenge in his photography after finishing the series
Primates and Immaculate. It was late 2010 and the photographer was in
India, meeting a lot of travelers. Motivated he would just ask
fellow-travellers if they would embrace the surrounding for a while,
naked. What followed were many conversations and debate, there was
some fear, some surprise, and of course many questions. In the end
Brulat has photographed both natives and travelers, all sharing a
path for a while, before then often saying goodbye to each other for
ever. With only a marvellous photograph as proof of their encounter.
When
Brulat left Paris he was traveling with a big bag, but by the the
photographer arrived in China, all he kept was the 4×5 (large format
camera) and a few lenses, the films, and a tripod, on top a few
artefacts, antiques, tissues and other things found on the way,
linked to memories of a time from the journey that laid behind him.
Changing from time to time depending on temperatures some clothes
which were bought along the way, one pant, two warm sweaters, a pair
of shoes, a few underwear, and a jacket, a warm blanket in case of
cold sleeping places, all packed tightly in a canvas bag found in an
Iraqi Kurdish Bazar. Travelling with only the utmost necessities in
order to find new experiences and more beautiful travelers and
locations to photograph them in.
"Ruben
Brulat’s approach has something romantic to it, romantic in the
nineteenth century sense. His work ist that of a lonely, fanatic and
mystic person, who’s thrown himself into a quest that confronts him
to the limits and that opens the doors to a new apprehension of the
world.
At
one time, following Amiel, a whole generation had proclaimed "every
landscape is a state of mind", directed its interest to unending
perspectives, which were damaged like life itself, tortured like the
human feeling. Fascinating, is how this new series of photos,
entitled Primates, could be described.
Nevertheless,
when a so-called Friedrich represented the human greatness as an
anonymous silhouette absorbed in the show of a sea of clouds, Brulat,
on the other side, does the complete opposite, by immersing it in
reality. For Brulat, it is not anymore a question of evoking the
greatness of a character, but that of Creation itself, where the
human being, as a species, searches for his place.
Among
the hostile rocks, the snow and the ice, barely inclined to welcome
life, there is a body without identity, totally naked and deprived.
Will he succeed to merge in this set, in this infinity of accidents?
Will he know how to be similar to the animal that reigns on its own
territory? This desperate attempt to transform this being into a
body, for it to be accepted or re-accepted by a matrix completely
foreign to the human substance, is very moving. This is when he is
nothing but a species, a man from thousands of years ago, forced to
know himself and to adapt himself to the outside conditions which are
nothing but threats.
Because
it is impossible to disregard the conditions of how these pictures
were taken, the risk-taking, the intense emotion, the spectacular and
the exploration of the limits are tangible. We perceive that the
artist answers to all his instincts, that he offers himself entirely
and allows himself to be reached by things. If sometimes a pillow of
snow seems more welcoming, softer, the spectator cannot repress the
shiver that activates in him this defenseless subdued body and
devoured by elements. He feels the urgency, the impossiblity to
think, but also the speed and the unexpected sensual delight of the
action.
Certainly, he doesn’t create the illusion that the fusion with the nature is possible without fight or conditions. But this series recounts a collection, with its set of disappointed hopes and aborted attempts, and at the end of the road, a figace but an indisputable triumph, even if for a split of a second, to be able to create the symbiosis: when the human being, as if calmed, seems to become confused with a rocky mass of fallen rocks, to float serenely on the surface of a black groundwater beside a crust of ice, or to find refuge in the hollow of a carpet of sweet grass, in the dense and deep green." Dan Nisand
Certainly, he doesn’t create the illusion that the fusion with the nature is possible without fight or conditions. But this series recounts a collection, with its set of disappointed hopes and aborted attempts, and at the end of the road, a figace but an indisputable triumph, even if for a split of a second, to be able to create the symbiosis: when the human being, as if calmed, seems to become confused with a rocky mass of fallen rocks, to float serenely on the surface of a black groundwater beside a crust of ice, or to find refuge in the hollow of a carpet of sweet grass, in the dense and deep green." Dan Nisand
