Photographer Jacques HAMEL is the Edge of Humanity Magazine contributor of this documentary photography. From the project ‘Península Ibérica Intemporelle, entre profane et sacré’. To see Jacques’s body of work, click on any photograph.

The Iberian Peninsula is a land of festivities, whether religious or pagan. Traditional carnival, pilgrimages and celebrations follow one another throughout the year. The images are abundant and powerful, but the photographer’s work is not made any easier. Tossed about like a piece of straw in this flood of madness, he has to choose and maintain his course. Jacques Hamel knows this, having spent fifteen years working in the field and in his laboratory, combining observation and technique, to produce this selection of breathtaking photographs.

During Holy Week, processions throw anyone who can walk into the streets. Strangeness is not absent from these parades, where hooded penitents, their feet in leather sandals, a lantern in hand, follow the processions for hours on end. The images, in their two-toned purity, let the unease born of this resurgent archaism, shaped by centuries of evolving traditions, pass by.

Over the purifying braziers, horses and horsemen rise, suspending their gallop, their breath, as the image-taker, adorned like a god with his extraordinary eye, seizes the smoking trinome, man, beast and fire. Eternity is now a prisoner. The hunter embalms his trophies, which will continue to pulse on glossy paper.

If, whether religious or not, rituals attempt to elevate the ordinary to a higher degree and propose to dominate the spirit via the body, the photographer’s job, for its part, is to isolate and elevate even higher one single micro-instant and return it to eternity. For he is the master to whom the elements submit. He brings life, and tames light, angles, fire, sky, earth and sea.

And while these fervent ceremonies, nurtured by symbols since the dawn of time, organize the desire for purification, the gateway to the sacred, the artist captures, between the pomp and its excesses, what he could see, that part of elegance and delicacy which, naturally, looks just like him.

Originally from Normandy, Jacques Hamel moved to the South-West of France forty years ago and now lives in the Landes region. In 1982, a simple passport photo revealed to him a part of his own story, as this trigger made him discover the art of photography, and marked the beginning of a fulfilled passion, initially self-taught.

Today, Jacques Hamel's quest regularly takes him deep into the Iberian Peninsula between Spain and Portugal. His work, a clever blend of documentary photography and oneirism, is rooted in resilience, hence the strong emotional charge contained in each of his works.

His photographs, and more particularly two of his series, « Arte Xávega, pêche en mer traditionnelle au Portugal » and « Península Ibérica Intemporelle, entre profane et sacré », have been exhibited in France, Spain and Portugal, and at numerous festivals.

All images © Jacques HAMEL

Text @ Martine Lafon-Baillou, Novelist