From June 19 to July 31, 2025, the gallery Retour De Voyage in L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, presents “The Time of a Petal”,
a luminous and delicate exhibition dedicated to the work of Denis Brihat, a major photographer and a poet of the plant world.
Seeing a Blade of Grass as a Work of Art
Denis Brihat cast an intensely attentive gaze upon the world of plants. His photographs—or rather, his photographic paintings—aim to reproduce the emotion he felt while observing nature. They reveal the accuracy, structure, and inner beauty of natural forms.
“Sometimes, a single well-observed blade of grass is enough to slow the heart.”
Blade of grass, leaf, flower… everything is framed and lit with an almost musical precision. Technique is never an end in itself, but a means of capturing the silence and breath of matter.
Rare and Precious Prints
The exhibition brings together a selection of artist’s proofs, signed and numbered, including early prints from The Claparèdes series (1962–63). These vintage originals reflect a vision as profound as it is poetic—somewhere between photography, engraving, and meditation.
Silver gelatin prints of exceptional finesse, toned with copper, iron, or selenium… each image is the result of demanding, artisanal craftsmanship.
A Photographer of the Living World, Internationally Recognized
Denis Brihat’s work is a landmark in the history of French photography. Featured in institutions like the BNF and MoMA, it embodies a life choice: one of slowness, silence, and deep connection to nature. Having settled in Bonnieux in the 1950s, Brihat turned photography into a way of life. Neither marginal nor trendy, he became a pillar—a quiet master of the attentive gaze.
An Exhibition to Slow Down, Feel, and Take Time
The Time of a Petal is an invitation to pause. To share in the artist’s foundational emotion in the face of the plant world. To discover how, through patiently honed technique, he succeeds in conveying that pure emotion.
Neither nostalgic nor fashionable, this exhibition is for those who appreciate slow images, the poetry of reality, and photography rooted in an intimate relationship with the living.
Each image is a meditation. The ordinary becomes iconic, reminding us that one must slow down in order to truly see.
