As much for their mystery as for their meaning, the statues of the Château de Vaux-le- Vicomte, captivated me from our first encounter. Having stood for 350 years in the gardens created by André Le Nôtre, the poetry of the dialogue between their sculptural forms, the light and the geometry and architecture of the gardens, within the context of the seemingly impenetrable silence of the mute statues inspired within me a desire to explore this unspoken exchange.

This project aims to immortalise more than three centuries and an half of interaction between the stone bodies and their environment, and invites us to consider the ways in which these works of art have lived through, and throughout, history. The camera lens transforms these statues, which have stood in the open air, exposed to the elements and the ravages of time, from inanimate stone into witnesses of history.

I first visited the gardens in the magical atmosphere of twilight. In that first encounter I sensed fragments of conversations emanating from the mouths of Hermes and Socrates, or was it Neptune whispering to Minerva… or perhaps it was just the wind? What can these statues tell us? In the space between life and death, they exist as a point of continuity between the two, where before they have stood silently threading together the centuries, they now become subjects of transition, symbolising landmarks of history in the landscape of eternity. Jörg Bräuer