Le monde de la douceur

It's not exactly what you may be thinking about today.  However, there is a phenomenon the French call le monde de la douceur, meaning a world of gentleness and sweetness,  a phenomenon they associate with the new year. Superficially it seems similar to Valentine's Day but its meaning extends  to the  romance of everyday life, something as real as our darker thoughts, even in the middle of winter.  A boy regarding a dandelion puff with singular concentration for instance, or blowing soap bubbles through a wand.

 A little harder to see,  perhaps, is the harmony in a landscape that humans share with waterbirds and grazing animals (just visible on the hillside).   

Two different photographers with two different ways of showing us this douceur (the French word is more expressive than the English translation.)  French photographer Daniel Boudinet composes an expansive landscape, an exercise in the symmetry that we can see in the natural world; in contrast the American Sharon Core's  recent series of photographs of found compositions in nature, the things we pass by without noticing, draws our attention to the charms of asymmetry.  

Images: 

1.Vincenzo Balocchi - Young Boy Looking at a Dandelion Puff, c.1960, Museo de Storia della Fotografia (Museum of the History of Photography), Florence.

2. Daniel Boudinet  - untitled, a wide view of water and animals before a mountain horizon, 1988, photograph from the series Voyage en Asie (Travels in Asia), Mediatheque, Paris.

3. Sharon Core - Untitled #3, 2015, archival pigment print from sharon core