INLAND VOYAGE

• Release date : 8 November 2022
• Photographs : Quentin Pruvost
• Text excerpts (An Inland Voyage 1878) : Robert Louis Stevenson
• Afterwords : Hervé Leroy et Jean-Philippe Mailliez
• Graphic Design : Arnaud Pavie, Quentin Pruvost et Eric Le Brun
• Book format : 21 x 27,5 cm / Weight : 0,700kg
• 128 pages  – 65 photographs (55 coloured, 10 black and white)
• Bilingual version: french, english
• English translation (afterwords): Harriet Thurgood
• French translation (text excerpts): Laurène Becquart
• Proofreading: Sandrine Harbonnier
• Print run: 900 copies
• Cover printed on Symbol Tatami Ivory 170gr and endpapers on Sirio Rough Royal Green 115gr
• CMYK photographs on Symbol Tatami Ivory 115gr and black and white photographs printed in silver pantone on Sirio Color Black 115gr
• Text excerpts on Sirio Color Black 115gr
• Afterwords on Munken Print White 115gr
• Softcover sewn glued spine
• ISBN : 9791095118237
• Public price : 39 €

Press and booksellers' comments

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Excerpts from newspapers articles and booksellers' comments

« French photographer Quentin Pruvost chose to explore the work of Scottish writer and traveler Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894). The latter made, at the age of 25, a canoe trip on the rivers of the North, from Antwerp to Pontoise, an experience that he will translate with humor and modernity in the book Inland Voyage. Accompanied by this story, the photographer begins his journey along the river and the canals of the Sambre to relive this initiatory journey.

The landscapes are also those of his childhood, thus awakening his own memories... From the first pages, we discover mysterious images where it is sometimes difficult to draw the dividing line between water and vegetation. The images confuse reality and illusion. The journey continues with a few portraits here and there that bring tangibility to those silent landscapes. »

« There’s lots of rain and the pair get soaked to the skin, a dampness caught in the chill of Pruvost’s fluvial illustrations, Stevenson’s trunks of hedgerow elms are caught in all their unworldly glory. “Trees are the most civil society.” You can near smell the sweetness of Pruvost’s forest photography.

As for the river we flow, looking at these shots, along with Arethusa and Cigarette, via a gentle pull of “enchanting purity”. One suspects Pruvost, like Stevenson, hates cynicism – both are unapologetically romantic. Their river workers, the poorer classes, are portrayed as being “much more charitably disposed than their superiors in wealth.”

John Quin in The National

Vegetation is mysterious, there is this feeling of presence, there is noise in silence.

The river could be called Mnemosyne.

Is it in Northern Europe or somewhere in Georgia, US ?

Appears a sailor, more likely a boatman, peaceful, focused on the landscape and his inner world.

The eyes navigate in the images, almost Tarkovskiesian ones but without the drama or the feeling of sacrifice specific to the Russian master.

There are certainly some monstrous industrial buildings, ancient human constructions laid down in the surroundings like scars, but everything passes, water flows, philosophy is the natural state of the shore walker.

Fabien Ribery in L’Intervalle

There is a photographic, musical and theatrical performance reading around the INLAND VOYAGE project.

The public follow the footsteps of Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson who canoed down the Sambre and Oise rivers...

The screening of Quentin Pruvost's photographs reveals explorations and contemplative, mysterious, fantastic moments of the trip, while the rendering of Hervé Leroy and Jean-Philippe Mailliez, actors-lecturers, adds Stevenson's whimsical and funny vision. The journey is punctuated by Timothée Couteau's two cellos…