Celebrity Life

The renowned American landscape photographer’s collection of over a hundered works will be up for bidding.

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The renowned American landscape photographer’s collection of over a hundered works will be up for bidding.

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Anthropologist and photographer Margot Errante talks to us about finding stillness in art, two wild decades in China, and her return to Italy.

Under the dramatic light, you make out bodily shapes, buildings, spaces and the blurring of lines between them.

A visual conjuring of emptiness and occupation – all in black and white. Lake Como-born photographer Margot Errante takes a well- trained anthropological eye to her work – this year it’s been the creation of meditative diptychs titled The Corporeal City, shot during a pandemic lockdown around her hometown.

“While it’s not a project about the pandemic,” Errante says, there’s a sense of emptiness that’s reflective of the times. But as someone who worked as an early-rising travel photographer and lived through SARS in China, “neither empty cities nor this kind of situation was completely new for me”.

It was a good time, though, “to observe the city and to reflect on the environment we’ve built for ourselves to live in… analogous of exterior and inner space”. There’s exploration between the body and space, each a container for our inner and outer worlds that are nevertheless “intimately interconnected”. Shadows and high contrast lend dramatic expression to each picture. The curve of spine and shoulders appears next to deserted streets, winding roads and sweeping archways.

[caption id="attachment_212150" align="aligncenter" width="683"] Metamorphosis, Transitions series.[/caption]

If Errante’s own explanations recall Eastern philosophy, this is no accident. She first practised Taoist meditation at Baiyun Temple in Beijing more than a decade ago. Upon her return to Italy, after 20 years in China and Hong Kong, the broad Taoist ethos of losing yourself and banishing your ego has been an important personal journey for the artist.

“As a photographer, your work is your story. My photography is my biography,” says Errante from her home, overlooking the famous north Italian lake. The Como mountains are misty during the winter, just like when I last visited her and snow had started to fall.

There’s no mistaking the romance of the region, which today features heavily in her work. For example, the Transitions series documents the summer of 2017 in Como and charts her feelings of return – partly driven by motherhood – after 20 years in Asia.

Errante expresses an inner world in colours, movement and light. A red dress, full of Asian symbolism, is brought into frames of travel and fragmentation in Myselves (2017) and Metamorphosis (2017). Then there’s symmetry, symbolism and subject.

“When I did Transitions, I realised there’s a you that transcends even your own narrative; no matter the time, space, country or movement … and it’s what makes you alive,” says the artist.

[caption id="attachment_212151" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Myselves, Transitions series.[/caption]

“After 20 years, of course it was a very complicated moment, I had very contrasting feelings about everything. For me, China was my home. At the same time, I wanted to do this transition but I was leaving my life, my career. I was born in Italy but never even worked here… but through the series I realised that we become so attached to everything external, we attribute too much responsibility of these external things to our own happiness.”

Perhaps this finds new meaning for many more than just the artist today. As the established world system is upended, frequent flyers are grounded, material things seem to matter less, art seems to matter more and social fragility is all too apparent.

For Errante, whose family name actually means “the wanderer” in Italian, it’s also finding stillness after so many years on the move. After graduating from the local liceo scientifico (scientific high school), the teenage Errante lived in Germany and Paris before training as an interpreter in Trieste, Italy, where she took up Chinese studies. A year later, at 19, she left alone for China. The multilingual photographer (she also speaks English, French, Chinese and Portuguese) would go on to obtain a degree in anthropology and oriental linguistics, and is currently studying Buddhism at the Lama Tzong Khapa Institute in Italy. Biography, as you’ll see, is key to understanding her work.

Even the aestheticism of shadows and drama “was not an intentional choice but very spontaneous”, she explains. “I like dense colours and, unlike many people, I’m not afraid of darkness. I quite like darkness and I think it’s because I spent a lot of time in the Chinese countryside in the late ’90s, when there was no light in the evenings, but we still used to go out and it was OK.”

[caption id="attachment_212152" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Wa Dance.[/caption]

The technique helps add depth to her images of nature and forests, while architectural works (often of vintage or ancient buildings) seem eerie and Edward Hopper-esque. The way it forces the viewers’ concentration can feel intense.

“In the darkness, you need concentrate more if you want to see. In the dark, there’s no immediate visual response or immediate visual satisfaction,” Errante reasons. “I wanted to have people get close to the photo, to search for details and spend time with the image – it was a way for me to say, ‘Look a bit more, concentrate a bit more, hang in there, you may find out there’s something there.’”

Moving on to her portraiture, today’s work is far more curated and singular than earlier work of Beijing city streets or villagers in southwestern Yunnan province, near Myanmar. Witnessing two decades (1997-2017) of China’s rise to an industrial and economic superpower has had enormous impact on her outlook.

One of Errante’s strongest human portraits – Wa Dance (2004), featuring bodies jumping in unison, faces upturned to the sky – came from eight months of living, observing and conducting ethnographic research about an indigenous Wa ethnic minority village more than 15 years ago. A dance of welcome for a foreign face – who had arrived dramatically by motorbike through the jungle in the rain – turns into a work of rhythmic vibrancy.

[caption id="attachment_212153" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Beijing Utopia.[/caption]

“They were all sweaty and full of energy,” she says. “These bodies were really tense, strong, with a lot of muscle – they looked like panthers; I felt hypnotised.”

Her work as a freelance photojournalist took Errante through Eastern Europe, Central Asia, China and North Korea. Themes of architecture and personal psychology (especially in post-Maoist developing China) emerged. She inhabited the underground art scene of the Chinese capital until, in 2009, her apartment was ransacked and her entire photographic archive of more than 10,000 negatives – the work of 15 years – was stolen. Heartbroken, Errante left the Chinese capital and never returned, choosing to settle in Hong Kong’s dense urban jungle.

This chapter would lead Errante to the transition to art portraiture and art photography, and exhibiting in several galleries, festivals and fairs such as Art Basel. Last year, her series Human Nature was awarded first prize at Paris Fotofever. The narrative is still biographical, Errante tells me, even though life no longer involves motorbike rides through the jungle or wild nights in the Beijing art scene. She’s rediscovering aspects of her own history and Italian heritage, too. Porta Torre (2019) is a vision of ancient architecture and nature in Como, Lombardy, for example.

[caption id="attachment_212154" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Mindscapes, Porta Torre series.[/caption]

And even if we are seeing the world through such personal, intimate experiences, there’s something to which we can all relate. Such is Human Heart (2017), a photograph of an old suitcase in her favourite woods in Como – it’s a reference to her grandfather Salvatore Errante, who emigrated from Sicily to Lake Como.

“The suitcase belonged to him. One day he told my grandmother that he was going out for cigarettes – but he jumped on the train and just left. Only when he found a job in Como did he call her to come to meet him,” Errante explains. Those wandering genes are seemingly well expressed throughout their lineage. Since then, that suitcase has become kind of a mystical object in her family. “It represents the struggle not just of my grandfather,” she says, “but of every human being who moves to look for a better future, of improvement, for something better.”

(All images: Margot Errante)

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Leica has teamed up with Billingham ‘Hadley’ Collection to create a new “Explorer” Kit that promises more impactful travel, wildlife, and sports photography.

The Leica V-Lux 5 universal compact camera for travel, wildlife, and sports photography, is now on sale in a set that includes additional accessories, namely a special Billingham carrying case and COOPH carrying strap to create a new “Explorer” kit.

The Hadley Digital bag comes in Imperial Blue Canvas and Tan Leather that is distinguished by its style and functionality. With its cleverly designed features and waterproof materials, it offers optimum protection and ample space for the safe storage of the camera kit.

The camera itself impresses with an extensive range of features, versatile functions, and an intuitive handling concept. Whether for travel, sporting events or outdoor adventures, the Leica V-Lux 5 is the perfect camera for capturing photographic memories with perfect picture quality. With an enormous range of focal lengths from 25 to 400 mm, its zoom lens is ideal for all photographic situations – from wide-angle, standard, and telephoto photography to macro close-ups down to a distance of only 3 centimetres.

Its fast autofocus reliably captures every subject and a continuous shooting function with up to 12 frames per second at full resolution, making it a great choice for sport and wildlife photography. The camera’s performance profile is complemented by a high-definition, 4K-resolution, digital video recording function that captures true-to-life memories in moving pictures.

This story first appeared on Prestige Indonesia.

(All images: Leica)

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Fifty metres underground — this is the depth that local winemakers chose when they decided to store 10,000 wine bottles in the Aven d'Orgnac caves, an underground tourist attraction located at the southern end of the limestone plateau of the Gorges de l'Ardèche.

The experiment began in March 2018, when a new storage facility was specially created in a disused access tunnel to allow wine to mature in what amounts to a highly stable and peaceful environment.

A living product that ages best in undisturbed darkness, the wine will have benefited from ideal conditions: A constant temperature of around 12°C and an all-year-long rate of humidity of over 95%.

On December 12, 1,000 bottles of Côtes du Vivarais "Grand Aven 2017" from this treasure trove will be passed from hand to hand by a chain of human volunteers who will bring them back to the surface after two years underground. Thereafter, they will go under the hammer with a range of other local vintages in an auction with modest reserve prices.

Lots on offer will include 150 magnums of Terra Helvorum 2017 starting at 30 euros, 350 bottles of 2015 Terra Helvorum for as little as 15 euros and 350 bottles of Grand Aven 2016 from just 10 euros.

On land and sea

These days, experiments to store wine deep underground are very much in vogue in France. On June 3 of this year, 500 bottles were placed in racks at a depth of 103 metres in caves in Padirac under the watchful eye of Serge Dubs, the Best Sommelier of the World in 1989.

The first of these to return to the surface will be brought up for an initial tasting in the spring of 2021. And let's not forget that this experiment is focused on a very particular wine: A Clos Triguedina Cahors, christened Cuvée Probus, which has been produced to honour the 130-year anniversary of the Padirac Chasm.

Surprisingly enough, this new approach to maturing wine was initially inspired by a find at sea. In 2010, divers in the Baltic discovered a wreck containing what turned out to be a cargo of champagne, which was probably on its way to 1840s Russia.

The wave of experimentation that is now ongoing began when the bubbly, which was made by such houses as Veuve Clicquot, Heidsieck and the now defunct Juglar, was discovered to still be delicious after some 170 years under water.

In Saint-Jean-de-Luz in the French Basque country, winemaker Emmanuel Poirmeur has registered a patent for a process that involves vinifying wine in special vats at a depth of 15 metres under water. For its part, Leclerc-Briant set a record when it vinified one of its champagnes at a depth of 60 meters under the Atlantic in 2012, not surprisingly the vintage was christened "Abyss."

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