Dominique Laugé

In the Uyghur language, Taklamakan means the desert "in which you can enter but from which you don’t return”. Nevertheless, many have defied the desert and triumphed. Oases and even kingdom rose from its sands, prospered and then fell down during the centuries. Today only few millennial ruins remain as testimony of this past, and at their side new towns, oil fields and skyscrapers have soared, symbols of the recent industrialisation that has turned the Xinjiang region, rich in oil, gas and uranium, into the new Chinese Eldorado. The book intertwines two ways of storytelling, photographs and narration, which are set in dialogue so as to present two points of view on the world which complement one another, mixing past and present, fiction and reality.The volume is also published in french edition with ISBN 978-88-6010-177-8.

Dominique Laugé is a well-known photographer in the advertising world. L’occhio incantato presents his latest production, his photographic quest in the ever-changing natural environment in search of lights and shadows that bring to life sea surfaces, glaciers, volcanic ashes, autumnal woods, flowery meadows. His works immediately remind of another famous photographer, Ansel Adams, but for Dominique Laugé the commitment is not limited to the photographic technique and the subjects to be portrayed, but spans to the medium to print his work on, the paper. For this series of pictures, Laugé selected a hand-made paper, produced in Sicily, especially fine-tuned so as to enhance the photos’ light and contrast; in the book, within the limits of industrial production, the publisher has paid particular attention to the paper so as to reproduce the same sensations given by original artworks.