En Plein Air

En Plein Air refers to the practice of painting outdoors. It entered the public lexicon in France in the 1800s with the advent of portable easels and paint tubes; artists, once confined to their studios, could now create their work—landscapes, portraits, nocturnes—out in the world. Many photographers busy themselves with still lifes and studio portraits; I, on the other hand, am drawn to the flat, airy landscapes of central Illinois. I’m charmed by waterlogged fields, termite-ridden barns, and the symmetry of phone lines and cornfields. En Plein Air is a collection of snapshots of rural vistas and landmarks, moments frozen in time. It also includes images from my series Midwest Gothic, which combines historical texts with landscapes from Central Illinois and South-Central Missouri. Together, this collection of images alludes to a distant memory of a once-bustling hub of agriculture, left to decay as the country aged. —————— Ciel Baptiste is a film photographer based in Urbana, Illinois. They discovered photography through Parkland College and quickly developed a love for film grain, chromatic aberrations, and high contrast. Deeply influenced by cinema, Baptiste draws inspiration from auteurs such as Agnès Varda, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Andrei Tarkovsky, whose photographic sensibilities inspired them to harness the power of the image. A lifelong resident of Illinois, they aspire to create a body of work that pays homage to the beauty of the Midwest and work exclusively within that region. For Baptiste, image-making is only half complete when the shutter is pressed. The other half takes place in the darkroom, where negatives are enlarged and inverted, contrast is refined, scale is tested, and the image is otherwise shaped and transformed. It is in the darkroom that the real, intended photograph emerges. Their work has been featured in several juried exhibitions at Parkland College’s Giertz Gallery, as well as in Immaterial Books 2024 Fields of Vision show. www.cielbaptiste.com —————— Edition: 100 Page Count: 26 Dimensions: 5.5”x8.5” Format: Saddle Stitch / Zine ISBN: 978-1-962415-13-2