Wild Rose
by Gabrielle Duplantier
At the heart of the book Wild Rose lies the house where Gabrielle Duplantier grew up.
An old, immense, isolated house, surrounded by forest.
On the day of her birth, a fire broke out in part of the house, forcing the unpleasant caretakers to leave. Her mother saw this as a good omen, which she attributed to the aura of her newborn daughter.
Gabrielle’s father, a taciturn draftsman, rose at dawn to draw, roam the woods, fell trees, and make the furniture himself.His eclectic and vibrant family was somewhat out of step with the village and rarely interacted with the inhabitants, preferring to stay home and celebrate with their friends and family. Her parents’ divorce and then her mother’s death were turning points: her father, who stayed behind, spiraled into despair and let the house fall into disrepair around him. In 2020, after traveling to Romania, Portugal, Morocco, and India to take photographs, the Covid pandemic hit. Gabrielle returned to France and took refuge in the house with her family. Immediately, the energy emanating from the house enveloped her. “This isn’t how things were supposed to happen, it wasn’t planned, but in the end, everything fell into place. The house needed me.” The lockdowns added a precious quality to these times of isolation. The uncertainty of the present and the future, the stories of death and illness from the outside world, infused the house with an atmosphere of protection, warmth, and love.
After the health crisis, Gabrielle left everything behind to settle there, devoting herself to caring for her aging father and restoring the dilapidated house. Immersing herself for hours in nature, she rediscovered a silence and an energy she describes as ecstatic.
For Gabrielle, photography is neither technical nor necessarily documentary, and Wild Rose is not simply about the house, her mother, or her memories. Her images are rather the allegorical expression of a relationship between an external stimulus and a rich inner reality. Questions and the unseen find their voice.
Like her landscapes and still lifes, her portraits are an allegorical expression of the purity and intensity with which she lives in the present. On this project, which wasn’t initially a plan but became one despite herself, Gabrielle worked with passion and discretion, sharing her images only with her publisher, David Fourré. Wild Rose is a tender book, both in its form and content, that underscores the approach Gabrielle has always followed: “Taking photographs is about loving what you see.”
You can find The Wild Rose Exhibition on display at the Carré d’Art in Chartres-de-Bretagne, France, from April 10 to June 24, 2026.
