Description
Arcachon Bay has two histories, one written by the sea, the other by people. In 1857 an imperial decree made Arcachon a commune; the same year the railway, then in the hands of the Pereire brothers, reached it, and the Ville d’Hiver, built from 1862 to 1865 on the wooded dune, turned it into a resort. Two years later, in 1859, the embryologist Victor Coste, professor at the Collège de France, charged by Napoleon III with reviving oyster culture, carried out here the experiments from which the imperial oyster parks were born; the limed tile, perfected in 1865, then made it possible to collect the spat. The bay has remained one of the great centres of European oyster farming: some three hundred businesses produce between 8,000 and 10,000 tonnes of oysters here every year.
The photograph reverses the balance of the first part: the sand withdraws to the margins and leaves the surface to fill almost the whole frame. The light catches the ripples and turns them into a tight, almost textile grain; beneath the transparency, the shallows draw dark branching shapes. On the right, long tongues of golden sand still wind. In the middle, a tiny dot, a lone boat, keeps the eye from tipping entirely into abstraction.
The relief photographed here no longer exists. The bay’s channels migrate over a cycle of seventy to eighty years, and the storms of the winter of 2023–2024 reshaped the banks so thoroughly that navigation there was banned for several weeks in the spring of 2024. The second part of the Ondulations series: after the relief, the surface.
