A rump made into a hill, a mane becoming a branch… Under the eye of Mimi Plumb, the horse is much more than an animal: a landscape, a refuge, an element among the elements, in the same way as water, the air, earth. At the end of the 1990s, tired of San Francisco, where she made her career, the Californian photographer discovered, during a walk east of Fresno, a herd of untamed mustangs.
They live in the wild lands of Kings Canyon National Park, south of Yosemite Park. From the first moments, she is captivated by their freedom. For several years, she went to meet them, looking at them with a look of infinite tenderness. His images are collected in the book Megalith-Still, published in English by Stanley/Barker.
Born in Berkeley in 1953, raised in the bay near Oakland, Mimi Plumb spent years photographing the reality of San Francisco. Not that of tourists attracted by the Golden Bridge, but that of a harsh city, crossed by loops of highways and glaring inequalities. It reveals the shadows, the waste, the homeless (” homeless “). Until Kings Canyon offered itself to her: a terra incognita, in her eyes, far from the hubbub of the city. “I wanted to photograph something I loved rather than something I criticized, she explains to the site specializing in art Recessed.space. I needed it, to exist in the world. »
Mustang fragments
Each time she returns to Kings Canyon, she tries to tame the fiery herd as much as possible. Knowing how easily animal photography can turn into a cliché, she approaches the horses little by little, until she achieves striking body-to-hand combat between herself and her models. Long eyelashes that hide an eye, the curve of a back forever free from the saddle, the slender line of a leg, the veins running along a muzzle… As he approaches, the majestic bodies of the horses become fragments, sometimes in pieces. the limit of abstraction. Chestnut, palomino, cremello, the shades of their dresses are rendered in an infinite palette of grays.
Did the artist look at the famous horse portraits of the 18th century British painter?e century George Stubbs or that of the stallion Whistlejacket, seized in full leave, exhibited at the National Gallery, in London? Has she studied Géricault’s white thoroughbreds, just as proud under stormy skies? Maybe. But his approach is more of an intimate, sensual, sculptural conversation. “The horses lie on the ground, their legs folded, their mouths surrounded by blades of grass, she describes in the book. Flies circle around their moist, sparkling eyes. I am as close as the focus allows me, examining their heads, their tails, their hooves, their bellies, bewitched by the sensuality of the horse and the place. »
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