Sterenn Eckmühl

The Eckmühl lighthouse is in southern Finistère, below a surfing mecca in Brittany, the bay of Audierne, the long line on the left on the cyanography.
Childhood memories dot my memory… and the shooting of Océan, by Jacques Cluzaud and Jacques Perrin, the last time I was there.

In 2019 I went back there under amazing circumstances, a coup de théâtre offered me a family around here. A great weekend of walks and emotions, photos, the carnival of Dourmenez in the rain, waves, the lighthouse of Eckmühl.
At the end of the year, big reunions in complete families, a birthday in the “new” branch and this cyanography which reinterprets this amazing turn of life.cyanography includes two visual sources, first of all the base painted with cyanotype ink, in the shape of a map of the region where the lighthouse of Eckmühl is located, the point of Penmarc’h. This map is drawn by hand in large format, 50 cm by 65 cm, and painted with some effects on the contours, more or less sharp, wet, dry depending on the nature of the shore, beach, port, etc.. The image shows it before the exposure so in yellow-green, the paper is still curled, on the table in the dark part of the studio.

In this first version by Sterenn Eckmühl, I painted the inside of the card with photosensitive ink, to place the spiral pattern under our steps. The sea is thus in white, the land in blue. In a more maritime version, still with the same negative, I chose a part of the map further west and it is the sea that is painted. The spiral is in front of the Bay of Audierne, like the great wave of Hokusaï.
The second visual source is a photographic montage of the staircase inside the lighthouse.  The negative I created comes from several photos taken from the top of the stairs, in order to enhance the two motifs: The spiral is a little off-center and in the middle the star.

Similarly, I reworked the walls, shiny plates of opaline, notably by erasing the narrow windows of the lighthouse. I wanted to avoid the play of light, architectural details that catch the eye in the wrong direction. The star, the spiral, the map, the poetic twist is in place and each gaze can give way to its own imagination. This lighthouse was ideally situated to compose my cyanography, both in geography, in sensitive charge and in history: when I asked about its funny name, I knew that it was him I had to choose, and no other lighthouse, no other staircase :

Indeed, the Marquise Adélaïde-Louise d’Eckmühl de Blocqueville bequeathed in her will the sum of 300,000 francs for the construction of a lighthouse. This lighthouse will be named “Eckmühl’s lighthouse” in honor of her father Marshal Louis-Nicolas Davout, Prince of Eckmühl.
This title of nobility comes from the battle of Eckmühl which he had led on April 22, 1809 near the village of Eggmühl in Bavaria. With this gesture, the Marquise hopes that “the tears shed by the fatality of wars, which I fear and hate more than ever, will be redeemed by the lives saved from the storm. “She also wants the lighthouse to be located on the coast of Brittany and in a safe place to stand the test of time.
Thank you for the article from wikipedia and the Marquise d’Eckmühl.