LAPALUS Charlotte.
Clouds. Charlotte Lapalus.
Amers Editions
Regular price
€65,00
| N° d'inventaire | 30394 |
| Format | 21.2 x 29.2 |
| Détails | 42 p., 15 color photographs, paperback. |
| Publication | Marseille, 2023 |
| Etat | Nine |
| ISBN | 9782492820045 |
“1802, Lombard Street, London: A certain Luke Howard (1772 - 1864), an English pharmacist turned renowned meteorologist, proposes a new classification of clouds. Naming three main categories—cumulus, stratus, and cirrus—as well as a series of intermediate states and modifications, such as cirrostratus or stratocumulus, Howard emphasizes the intrinsic mutability of clouds, a significant point—and a fundamentally poetic mission—that was lacking in the first attempt at classification made earlier by the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamark (1744 - 1829).
From then on, history would designate Howard as "the inventor of clouds", science would adopt his system and artists would draw inspiration from it. Seas of mist in Caspar David Friedrich, raging skies in William Turner or dappled masses in Eugène Boudin: for the British critic John Ruskin, the 19th century was a century "in the service of clouds"[1]. Among these painters attentive to atmospheric variations, John Constable (1776-1837), based at the top of Hampstead Hill in North London, would particularly devote himself to the meticulous study of clouds. For Constable, the shape or colors of these masses of water vapor - and through them, the scientific phenomena at the origin of their formation, as well as the weather that would follow - became real objects of study.
At the end of the 19th century, in 1873, three meteorologists belonging to the International Meteorological Organization—Hugo Hildebrand Hildebrandsson, Albert Riggenbach, and Léon Teisserenc de Bort—were tasked with compiling the first International Cloud Atlas. They worked on it for twenty-three years, and a first version was finally published in 1896. In addition to paintings and drawings, it featured color photographs of clouds for the first time, a complicated and expensive process at the time. The work, still relevant from a scientific perspective, can also be seen as a work of art and demonstrates the alliance between science and photography, as well as the infinite aesthetic potential of clouds.
This is how we thought, in the light of these pictorial and meteorological studies, of the work "Clouds" by Charlotte Lapalus who, from Europe, Canada or the Sahara, continually records remarkable states of the sky.
His framing, devoid of any terrestrial reference, recalls those of Constable's Cloud Studies: the sea above which the clouds form, the mountains in which they cling, or the plains that darken under their passage, disappear from his photographs. Attention is definitely paid to the motif and the light: there, the opaline filaments of a cirrus cloud, there the muted and dark loops of a cumulonimbus, or the agitated masses of nimbostratus which slowly aggregate then suddenly light up from within. In a chromatic wandering - which reflects their evolving character - the clouds pass from white to gray, turning pink, yellow or purple, depending on their altitude, the blue of the sky, or the position of the sun in relation to the horizon... Sometimes, particular lighting such as fires or the lights of large cities can interfere with their natural colors.
Then other questions arise in the era of the Anthropocene. Jet contrails, urban pollution smog, factory plumes, and mushroom clouds have all entered the atmospheric landscape since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. These clouds are called anthropogenic clouds, and they all have in common that they are artificially created by human activities.
In the 1950s, moreover, the first cloud seeding tests—and with them climate manipulation—began to raise new health, ecological, and geopolitical concerns, with the potential establishment of a legal status for clouds, which seemed to know no borders and, despite everything, found themselves prey to weather wars. For while the effects of their behavior and future metamorphoses play a decisive role in climate change, they nevertheless constitute one of the main sources of uncertainty faced by researchers and modelers.
In this nebulous context, Charlotte Lapalus's photographs appear as an injunction to cultivate our sense of observation, to strengthen the attention and interest we have in these cottony giants. Their imposing masses, their muted or incandescent tones scream mystery, urgency and poetry, a triad with which we must compose when we evoke these scientific UFOs that tirelessly form on the surface of the water and rise into the troposphere.”
[1] John Ruskin, Modern Painters (1840)
From then on, history would designate Howard as "the inventor of clouds", science would adopt his system and artists would draw inspiration from it. Seas of mist in Caspar David Friedrich, raging skies in William Turner or dappled masses in Eugène Boudin: for the British critic John Ruskin, the 19th century was a century "in the service of clouds"[1]. Among these painters attentive to atmospheric variations, John Constable (1776-1837), based at the top of Hampstead Hill in North London, would particularly devote himself to the meticulous study of clouds. For Constable, the shape or colors of these masses of water vapor - and through them, the scientific phenomena at the origin of their formation, as well as the weather that would follow - became real objects of study.
At the end of the 19th century, in 1873, three meteorologists belonging to the International Meteorological Organization—Hugo Hildebrand Hildebrandsson, Albert Riggenbach, and Léon Teisserenc de Bort—were tasked with compiling the first International Cloud Atlas. They worked on it for twenty-three years, and a first version was finally published in 1896. In addition to paintings and drawings, it featured color photographs of clouds for the first time, a complicated and expensive process at the time. The work, still relevant from a scientific perspective, can also be seen as a work of art and demonstrates the alliance between science and photography, as well as the infinite aesthetic potential of clouds.
This is how we thought, in the light of these pictorial and meteorological studies, of the work "Clouds" by Charlotte Lapalus who, from Europe, Canada or the Sahara, continually records remarkable states of the sky.
His framing, devoid of any terrestrial reference, recalls those of Constable's Cloud Studies: the sea above which the clouds form, the mountains in which they cling, or the plains that darken under their passage, disappear from his photographs. Attention is definitely paid to the motif and the light: there, the opaline filaments of a cirrus cloud, there the muted and dark loops of a cumulonimbus, or the agitated masses of nimbostratus which slowly aggregate then suddenly light up from within. In a chromatic wandering - which reflects their evolving character - the clouds pass from white to gray, turning pink, yellow or purple, depending on their altitude, the blue of the sky, or the position of the sun in relation to the horizon... Sometimes, particular lighting such as fires or the lights of large cities can interfere with their natural colors.
Then other questions arise in the era of the Anthropocene. Jet contrails, urban pollution smog, factory plumes, and mushroom clouds have all entered the atmospheric landscape since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. These clouds are called anthropogenic clouds, and they all have in common that they are artificially created by human activities.
In the 1950s, moreover, the first cloud seeding tests—and with them climate manipulation—began to raise new health, ecological, and geopolitical concerns, with the potential establishment of a legal status for clouds, which seemed to know no borders and, despite everything, found themselves prey to weather wars. For while the effects of their behavior and future metamorphoses play a decisive role in climate change, they nevertheless constitute one of the main sources of uncertainty faced by researchers and modelers.
In this nebulous context, Charlotte Lapalus's photographs appear as an injunction to cultivate our sense of observation, to strengthen the attention and interest we have in these cottony giants. Their imposing masses, their muted or incandescent tones scream mystery, urgency and poetry, a triad with which we must compose when we evoke these scientific UFOs that tirelessly form on the surface of the water and rise into the troposphere.”
[1] John Ruskin, Modern Painters (1840)
From then on, history would designate Howard as "the inventor of clouds", science would adopt his system and artists would draw inspiration from it. Seas of mist in Caspar David Friedrich, raging skies in William Turner or dappled masses in Eugène Boudin: for the British critic John Ruskin, the 19th century was a century "in the service of clouds"[1]. Among these painters attentive to atmospheric variations, John Constable (1776-1837), based at the top of Hampstead Hill in North London, would particularly devote himself to the meticulous study of clouds. For Constable, the shape or colors of these masses of water vapor - and through them, the scientific phenomena at the origin of their formation, as well as the weather that would follow - became real objects of study.
At the end of the 19th century, in 1873, three meteorologists belonging to the International Meteorological Organization—Hugo Hildebrand Hildebrandsson, Albert Riggenbach, and Léon Teisserenc de Bort—were tasked with compiling the first International Cloud Atlas. They worked on it for twenty-three years, and a first version was finally published in 1896. In addition to paintings and drawings, it featured color photographs of clouds for the first time, a complicated and expensive process at the time. The work, still relevant from a scientific perspective, can also be seen as a work of art and demonstrates the alliance between science and photography, as well as the infinite aesthetic potential of clouds.
This is how we thought, in the light of these pictorial and meteorological studies, of the work "Clouds" by Charlotte Lapalus who, from Europe, Canada or the Sahara, continually records remarkable states of the sky.
His framing, devoid of any terrestrial reference, recalls those of Constable's Cloud Studies: the sea above which the clouds form, the mountains in which they cling, or the plains that darken under their passage, disappear from his photographs. Attention is definitely paid to the motif and the light: there, the opaline filaments of a cirrus cloud, there the muted and dark loops of a cumulonimbus, or the agitated masses of nimbostratus which slowly aggregate then suddenly light up from within. In a chromatic wandering - which reflects their evolving character - the clouds pass from white to gray, turning pink, yellow or purple, depending on their altitude, the blue of the sky, or the position of the sun in relation to the horizon... Sometimes, particular lighting such as fires or the lights of large cities can interfere with their natural colors.
Then other questions arise in the era of the Anthropocene. Jet contrails, urban pollution smog, factory plumes, and mushroom clouds have all entered the atmospheric landscape since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. These clouds are called anthropogenic clouds, and they all have in common that they are artificially created by human activities.
In the 1950s, moreover, the first cloud seeding tests—and with them climate manipulation—began to raise new health, ecological, and geopolitical concerns, with the potential establishment of a legal status for clouds, which seemed to know no borders and, despite everything, found themselves prey to weather wars. For while the effects of their behavior and future metamorphoses play a decisive role in climate change, they nevertheless constitute one of the main sources of uncertainty faced by researchers and modelers.
In this nebulous context, Charlotte Lapalus's photographs appear as an injunction to cultivate our sense of observation, to strengthen the attention and interest we have in these cottony giants. Their imposing masses, their muted or incandescent tones scream mystery, urgency and poetry, a triad with which we must compose when we evoke these scientific UFOs that tirelessly form on the surface of the water and rise into the troposphere.”
[1] John Ruskin, Modern Painters (1840)