How seven photographers captured the textures and essence of the harvest fruit.
From vineyard to image, the grape becomes more than fruit: it is light, still life and living portrait. For over half a century, Lafite has invited great photographers to turn their lenses on the harvest. Here, we look at how seven artists — from Robert Doisneau to Sharon Core — reveal the grape in a thousand guises.
It is the fruit of the harvest, the sun, and time. In the hands of the winegrower, the grape guides the work. Through the lenses of great photographers, it becomes in turn movement, light, still life or a living portrait. For over fifty years, artists have been invited to capture their ’Views on Lafite’. Many of their images explore the thousand faces of the grape: the fruit of labour, the fruit of the eye, the fruit of the moment. Let’s take a journey through the eyes of seven photographers who saw grapes as beauty marks.
Robert Doisneau – 1993
A few months before the end of his life, Doisneau was still capturing what he loved most of all: people in motion. Here, the grape-pickers are emptying their bins, their movements confident, their faces concentrated. The fruit cascades downwards, the scene is raw and alive. We see the tenderness of the workers and the knowing regard of a man who has always had his eye on what happens backstage.
The diptych captures two parts of the same movement. First, the bunches rise up, projected into the air in joyous anarchy. Then the fall, a surge of grapes, almost abstract, like a shower of matter. In Kalvar’s work, the grape becomes a tide, a living mass. It is the fruit of the collective effort we see in the first image, this repetitive, back-breaking ballet, transformed here into a vibrant painting. A tribute to the power of movement.
John Stewart – 1959
His switch from fashion photographer in New York in the 1950s to Stewart’s image of a barefoot man in a vat, the grapes bursting under the pressure, is counter-intuitive. Working at the time for Vogue and Fortune, he captured the fleshy, living material. Far from the studio, but with the same sense of framing and vivid colours. And who knows, it may well have been Lafite that triggered the desire to devote his career to still life.
Gueorgui Pinkhassov – 2019
The grape is not in the basket: it’s in front. Immobile, almost frontal, it stands out like a face in the image. The picker passes by, hurried and absorbed. Pinkhassov reverses the roles: here, it is the fruit that looks on. The Russian photographer, obsessed with light and abstraction, makes the fruit the main character.
Between the gnarled vines, under an almost painted sky, the fox looks at the lens as if it knows Horvat is watching. This strange image, the result of a suggestion by Éric de Rothschild, is a mixture of documentary and fairytale. Horvat, a fashion photographer who is a master of subtle staging, here transforms a vine into the setting for a fable. The fruit is there, very real, but we are already plunged into the imaginary world of ‘The Fox and the Grape’, the moral of which has yet to be written…
The vine is alone. Detached from its environment, framed like a face in full light. Faigenbaum, a painter by training and a master of the photographic portrait, isolates a vine here as one would pose a model against a neutral background. Each knot, each shadow, each cluster becomes a line, a volume, a character. A simple image, full frontal and intense. Full of fruit and detail…
Sharon Core – 2014
It’s not a painting. And yet all the elements are there: the low-angled light, the velvety brown background, the skilful composition. Inspired by Flemish still lifes, Sharon Core patiently reconstitutes what painting had captured. Here, the grape says nothing. It rests, protected by its leaves as if by a theatrical curtain. An autumn fruit, suspended between botanical science and pure contemplation.
The grape appears throughout these photographs like a recurring character — never quite the same, always transformed. It is fruit, matter, motif. A witness to gestures, gazes, stories and eras. It speaks of the passing of time, of the hands that follow one another, of shifting perspectives. And what remains is the grape itself: a small, resilient beauty mark, cared for by humankind in the ongoing story of wine.
More recently, that same artistic gaze has turned to Long Dai, in China, where local photographers are also invited to capture the beauty of both the craft and the land. The same desire endures: to offer the vine a portrait that is faithful, sensitive, and lasting.
BRAIDING OUR WILLOWS TO CREATE NEW PERSPECTIVES.
Once a year, we invite a photographer to interpret Château Lafite Rothschild. In 2023, we welcomed Finnish artist Anti Laitinen.
A ‘Regard sur Lafite’ from Photographer Charlotte Dumas
In 2020, photographer and filmmaker Evgenia Arbugaeva selected the starry skies over Château Lafite Rothschild as her focal point, conjuring up a compelling chiaroscuro effect.
The grape harvest, that annual event, a story that is halfway human, halfway fruit.