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Text by Carl Norac.

We are sometimes persuaded that a landscape is being imposed upon us, filling us with its breadth, depth, horizontality and verticality, with all its dimensions, as if it were suddenly connecting with a part of our memory, or a precise reminiscence of our childhood, or, at any rate, with an image inscribed within us that lies outside of the usual passage of time. At other moments, a mystery lingers, a movement in the air, an unexpected gesture, a glance that slides away, an inquisitiveness in search of forms. It is these feelings, more than an analysis, that I experience when I look at the photographs in the book you are now holding in your hands. Similarly, when reading a poem, we sometimes stop for a moment, surprised, and say to ourselves: “How odd, it seems as though these words were written for me alone. I feel that there exists, hidden behind the words, a moment from my life, a secret thought, or that I have glimpsed my own face.” I was gripped by that same sensation when I first encountered the matter, light and atmosphere of Sea, Sand and Land.
I have lived in Ostend for the last six years. In the local Ostend dialect, I am what they call an angespoelde, someone who was not born here and who, according to this somewhat ironic term, is said to have arrived on the crest of the last wave. I like to introduce myself this way, as if each wave were spreading over the sand a whole new page to be lived, what the poet Paul Valéry once described as a reward in his most famous verse: “La mer, la mer, toujours recommencée!” Edouard Janssens’s photography invites you both into his world and, at the same time, onto the constantly renewed sandy shore of my own threshold.
 
Edouard Janssens, a Belgian photographer born in 1961, is known for his experimental work. From Windows to the Soul, in which he explores the human iris as a means to accessing a deeper, more internal vision, to Stratos-Sphere, the photographic expedition he developed and launched in 2011 to capture images of our planet from a balloon suspended thirty-three kilometres up in the sky – the sky both in its infinite vastness and constant transience. Later, during another of his ambitious artistic journeys, 1 à 100 ans, his subject was multiple portraits of children, women, and men of all ages, by means of which he aspired to discover the eternity that transcends life and death, beyond the mere brevity – even a century long – of our human destiny. And let us conclude with Expired Instants, a series of images impaired by the use of long out-of-date film. So many ways to address and surprise us.
To those who ask him about a yet more surprising new project, Edouard Janssens responds with an invitation to go for a walk. A wish to return to the essence of the breadth of vision, to attested simplicity, to a minimalism that is not detached but about sharing. Directing your gaze as one would take you by the hand. His work on time, a feature of his art, is indeed present, developing into a collection of moments. As a portraitist attentive to every detail and to expressions of exactness, he now declares his right to a stroll and invites you to join him. This book is not a maze, but it is indubitably a path, or a warren of intersecting trails of which you will build up a picture as you leaf through its pages, as time slowly passes behind you. The quest for simplicity, which is anything but simplistic, is a challenge as well as a passion. Just as in literature, especially poetry, simplicity is an adventure. Expressing a great deal in few words, for instance. Daring to dream. Attempting the paradox of a complex thought that suddenly becomes clear, like a horizon that becomes visible in just a few seconds once the clouds scatter.
As he walks, Edouard Janssens scrutinises snatches of the landscape, searching for alignments, whether of trees beside a canal or marks on the beach. I see here more gentleness than melancholy, and even an amused gaze with the animals that wander into these compositions. Not a still life, but rather images of perception, of clarity, of the murmur of the wind. With a keen sense of geometry, but which leaves room for chance, for coincidence.
It is a question of capturing light as it is, in its truest form, in the way that it “breathes”, and of singing the praises of grey. This colour is too little celebrated, with all its variations, of mist in a faint light, from a heavy sky to one longing to be disencumbered, or even its own gleam. Here, we are in the land of contrasts and nuances. Here, these greys, black and white, call out to us to pass through them with our bodies, but also with a more secret aspect of our gaze.
 
The places visited vary, such as Knokke, the Zwin, Zeebrugge, and then the landscapes of West Flanders, a province that stretches toward the sea but is traversed throughout by waterways, canals in particular. Mud and sand, slender trees in fragile harmony, that sometimes lean but never break, lush meadows: a vast natural décor is made yet more timeless by the choice of black and white. The aim is not to make a specific place recognisable on a map, but to be content with a sketch, a likeness. Nonetheless, our world is seen here and there – a passerby, a cabin, a street corner – like a scratch of civilisation on the surface of nature.
One day, when I was talking to the great Flemish poet Hugo Claus about Ghent, a city that had been of major importance in his life (after Ostend and before Antwerp), he told me that, to his mind, the unique imagery the city conjures up was derived partly from the emanations given off by the rivers that flow through it. This brings to mind Franz Hellens and magical realism, that way of embracing reality while searching for its fissures, of providing a viewpoint displaced from the norm without rejecting the immediate world. In these photographs, I discern the desire to make us feel the physicality and rouse our senses, and at the same time, by including the familiar presence of humans, animals or trees, a humble yet sure attempt to find an angle that will make us aware of what lies beyond the familiar. Our journey is rooted in the here and now – a wet, clear or white sky – yet it also evades the injunction of the clock. The shore retreats from its hourglass.
 
The expressionist painter Constant Permeke, who painted hundreds of seascapes in Ostend at all times of the day and night, spoke of his desire to show us the sea from the standpoint of the sea itself. In Edouard Janssens’s photographs, a dialogue is also present, in which the clarity of the forms is left to speak in its own words, as closely as possible. We often say that a landscape “speaks to us”. Well, then, let us have the humility to listen. Everything invites us to.
After living in France for twenty years, I returned to Belgium in 2019 to live by the North Sea, where I wrote poems about a strange impression I was having: back on this beach, where I had walked so often and for so long in the past, I felt as if my childhood footsteps were still visible in the sand. Impossible, you will of course reply, since the sand on a beach, like the text on a page, is in constant transformation – just like the ever-changing clouds. Yet this impression was like a revelation, one that had no need of proof. In similar fashion, Sea, Sand and Land too is like running along the line of the waves to forget the line of time. Like seeing the sea as a ramble, and each wave as a step. And letting our eyes dwell on a particular point of view, revolving around chance meetings between water and clouds, the encounters of dog and sand. A bird suddenly appears, as though it has been suspended in the air since the dawn of time. In this I recognise a daily vision of my life today.
If the sky is sometimes so low that we feel we can touch it – if not with the tips of our fingers, then certainly through the lens of the camera and, above all, the iris of the photographer – it is indeed. the case here. In this book, there is both maturity and serenity, the absence of affectation and ego, and something like the return of a curious, still extant childhood. A quintessence. And yes, the repeated invitation to take a walk within oneself and as close as possible to the landscape. It starts here.