At a crossroads in her personal life, and struggling with the restrictions imposed by Covid, Marjolein Martinot found solace in riverside walks in central and southern France. The result is a very personal body of work rich with mystery and beauty. Gordon Cairns reports.
Riverland is heavy with the sense of another place: people emerging from the water in the early morning light; faceless, symmetrical swimmers moving through the river; carefully stacked rocks in the water which somehow seem heavy with significance; the tattoo of a skull on an arm.
Marjolein Martinot’s new book firmly returns a set of rivers in southern France to their mythological source where flowing water could represent myriad things: the dwelling places of the gods, or the passageway from life into death. Even the title, echoing Neverland and the Lost Boys, or the song River Man by Nick Drake and its enigmatic lyrics – ‘If he tells me all he knows, about the way his river flows’ – adds to the sense of otherness.
The genesis for this magical book came from a week-long workshop run by British photographer Vanessa Winship five years ago in central France.
At the time, Martinot says she was ‘not in a good place’ personally, not helped by the restrictions imposed on us during the early days of Covid. Yet something happened to her when she separated from the other photographers on the workshop and came across a group of young boys playing on the long branches of a tree overhanging the River Creuse.
The contrast between the world of face masks and isolation and the innocence and freedom of children at play had a major impact on the photographer. ‘These boys were just splashing around; it was a magical moment for me,’ she says. ‘They were happy, and something shifted in me, and I felt like these pictures were good. I took many rolls but there’s only one picture in the book. It’s actually the last photo in the book now, but it was the very first photo of the project Riverland, though at the time of taking it, I didn’t know that yet.’
She continues: ‘At that particular time, I was having some really difficult moments in my personal life, and I was finding myself at a crossroads, while at the same time, the whole world was enduring the global trauma of the Covid pandemic. It felt almost surreal to be there during those challenging times, and to be photographing these gorgeous, happy and enchanting moments. It was kind of a eureka moment for me, and it ended up becoming the core of the work to which I wanted to add more to.’
The Dutch photographer went on to photograph a number of other rivers in France, the country she has lived in for more than half her life, over the next few years including the Aveyron, Viaur, Ruisseau de la Brive, Lot, Tarn and Garonne, and these photographs eventually became Riverland, published by Stanley Barker earlier this year.
Read Marjolein Martinot’s full interview with Gordon Cairns in B+W 307.