White Summer, White Snow
'Sologne'
encens magazine
The White Issue
The White Issue
(no.28 : 02/2012 - 09/2012)
Photographer: Sybille Walter
Stylist: Samuel Drira
Make-Up: Carole Colombani
Hair: Delphine Courteille
[apologies for the scan lines, glossy paper and hard spine = bad times]
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"When I opened my eyes this morning the garden was covered in snow. I had sensed that it was falling during the night. Some part of my body had been secretly registering that accumulation, the fact that something was quietly building up outside. I opened my window to a bright new world. How amazing are the many vistas this world has to offer us! When precipitation in the air freezes, it turns to snow. The crystallized ice particles are stunningly white. They blanket the entire landscape.
In recent years, so many things - architecture and cities, people and words - seem to have become semitransparent. Perhaps I should rather say that they feel as if they are only half there. Architecture feels lighter because of its use of glass and other new building materials, while the words that traverse the net float about in limbo with no real place to call home. Will they be somehow renewed unbeknownst to us? Or will they maintain their fresh appearance for years without ever acquiring the patina of age? We struggle on day after day, attempting to expand the freshness and the promise we feel in this new reality. After all, this semitransparent world is likely to go on growing. Perhaps the greater part of our conscious minds will end up residing there.
Yet the snow keeps falling. Flakes silently dance down to rest in my palm, where they melt into drops of light. White still has the power to bestow its divine grace upon these bodies of ours, which can neither disappear, nor renew themselves, nor turn semi-transparent. It looks like the snow will go on falling for a while."
- Kenya Hara, 3rd February 2008
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