Marta Rossignol, a Swiss-Spanish author and photographer, lives in Bordeaux.
An avid traveller, she explores the world in search of others and draws her inspiration from the spiritual centres of the planet: India, Tibet, Japan, Korea, Egypt, Israel, Peru and Easter Island. She has produced striking reports on the Amish communities, Hindu rites in Varanasi, a mysterious market in Madagascar, the Christians of Ethiopia…
Her sensitive, poetic approach to photography transports us into a humanist universe that is authentic, creative and unique.
Indian vertigo
Benares, Vârânasî…!?
No matter. The point where bodies and souls converge. I walk the thread of existence.
The Ghats, the path between life and death.
Nowhere else do I feel so alive, so mortal. A kind of distortion of my perception. On one side the physical presence, on the other the spiritual abyss. In between, bodies, fire, water, blood, colours, scents, songs and prayers. I get dizzy in this atmosphere. A mixture of a material and spiritual universe, condensed in tears, hope, laughter and silence.
My mind wavers, my vision blurs. Am I really there? Are they really? Life slides down the steps, drowns in the waters, is reborn in the songs, flies away in the smoke, is locked up in the ashes, fills the wind…
A man will soon no longer be a man. This woman is preparing to move on. This child takes the time to live. He knows that a cycle is underway, an ephemeral passenger of the living. I breathe, on the verge of suffocation. I look, close to blindness. I touch, on the verge of burning.
It was to Lalibela, in northern Ethiopia, at the heart of the largest Christian site in Africa, that the photographer set off to photograph the medieval churches carved out of boulders in the 12th century, a site now listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. She has returned with a series of striking black and white photographs.
Among them, the portrait of a little girl. It all came down to this meeting,” says Marta Rossignol. I was attracted by her beauty and the look in her eyes. I tried to understand what she was doing there, and was told that she was an orphan living with her grandmother. Moved by this encounter, the artist decided to dedicate these works to a project that could help Ethiopian children who, like this little girl, live in poverty. The child’s situation is far from isolated: as a result of the country’s civil war, 77 children out of 1,000 suffer from malnutrition.
j’adore, ma Véro! Bravo!!!
émouvant