photo4food grant
2026
Ōra
“To create a new world, one must start with a world that already exists. […] To discover one, perhaps one must have lost one. Or be lost oneself. The dance of renewal, the one that created the world, has always been danced here, on the edge, at the boundary, on the mist-shrouded coast.” Ursula K. Le Guin,
Ōra, the Latin version of the word ‘littoral’, ‘shore’, ‘coast’, or even ‘edge’ or ‘boundary’, could this be the name of a new land emerging from the Normandy coastline? As part of her residency in Deauville, Cécile Genest evokes the fantasy of a primeval landscape by highlighting nature that has been left to run wild. A trompe-l’œil of a tropical, exotic and mysterious territory, Ōra reminds us of the constant evolution of landscapes, shaped by the cycles and ceaseless movement of the elements and sediments characteristic of terrestrial shores.
A French photographer born in 1979 in Nantes, Cécile Genest lives between Paris and Nantes. Deeply influenced by German objective photography, she pays tribute to nature in all its forms and power, from its lushness to its infinite variety. Through the view camera and a close-up framing, she composes a portrait of the plant world that is both precise and evanescent, on the border between the terrestrial and the aquatic, where the image plays tricks on the eye and reveals the strata of life, between a buried past and a wild present. The artist reminds us that disorder is a condition of life, where biodiversity and geodiversity are intimately linked. Represented by the Caroline Berton agency, she has exhibited at the Itinéraires des Photographes Voyageurs festival (Bordeaux), amongst other venues.