The Camargue has long been one of those mysterious, spellbinding places whose borderland quality draws artists – painters, photographers and others – to its endlessly renewed sources of inspiration. It is hardly surprising, then, that Josef Koudelka – master of the panoramic, virtuoso of black and white – should have felt the urge to capture, in innovative formats and compositions, these inhabited yet still wild spaces. The Camargue is shaped by horizontality, by an architecture whose influence on ways of seeing and perceiving is such that it seems pointless to try to escape it. Koudelka’s vision takes this singular experience to new limits. Moreover, as in his most famous series – Gypsies, Exiles, Chaos – we find here a dizzying quality some have described as metaphysical: lagoons, salt marshes, tracks and sand offer a mingling of their concentrates and textures that defies all efforts to distinguish between mineral and vegetable, clouds and water, earth and sky. Anyone who knows or recognizes the Camargue will find in Koudelka’s images a call to perception of what photography rarely captures: the space of a silence. B.R.