Gorges de Franchard - Forêt de Fontainebleau (Franchard Gorges – Fontainebleau Forest) 20 - 1863

Curator: Looking at Eugène Cuvelier’s "Gorges de Franchard – Fontainebleau Forest," created around 1860 using a gelatin silver print, I'm immediately struck by the rather gloomy, even monumental feel of this landscape. Editor: Yes, it definitely feels weighted. Those heavy, brooding rocks dwarf the figure on the summit. It's as if the landscape itself is a character, a stoic giant. The lone figure, a tiny speck, really drives home that feeling of insignificance. The human confronting the vastness, the unyielding presence of nature. It whispers romantic ideals. Curator: Absolutely. Cuvelier, working in that Realist-Romantic cusp, often captured the raw grandeur of Fontainebleau. It's fascinating how the photograph transforms the forest into something almost primeval. Do you get a sense that he wants us to question the relationship between humanity and the overwhelming scale of nature? Editor: I see symbols layered one atop another. The climb to the top, maybe a pilgrimage to higher insight, wisdom? Yet the path looks difficult, full of struggle; light and shadows intermix with shapes that remind me of skulls. I cannot look away. What do you read in it? Curator: It feels elemental, primordial, doesn’t it? It invites us to imagine our place, quite tentatively, against its rocky, mossy bulk. Editor: The light and shadows, the gray scale, become like a map of past struggles—histories embedded into each stratum. He is more a part of the land and its deep history than the beginning of any climb to master it. Curator: He has to submit, right? Surrender to it completely and forever, I suppose. Editor: Which brings us to the cultural symbolism of forests in general – places of fairytale danger but also profound, introspective, imaginative possibility. And this picture somehow manages to hint at it all, through that play of light, and dark and resolute figure, as he almost vanishes into landscape. Curator: Right—vanishing is maybe exactly right, it could take one’s breath away, thinking about that moment of pure presence! I feel as though Cuvelier wasn’t just documenting a landscape; he was pointing us to the profound depth it could inspire in each one of us. Editor: Indeed, a space in which symbols echo across history—nature becoming a hall of mirrors where humans face, and slowly become, echoes of themselves. A space to imagine new folklore and fairytales.