Lot Essay
Titled Germinal after the verb "to germinate" and the name for the first month of the spring quarter in the French Republican center, six photographs subtly register the restoration process of a late nineteenth-century painting of a bucolic scene with two girls. Each photograph differs a tone from the previous one, as if the light were slowly germinating (or decaying, depending on which perspective). a second interpretation grounded in art history, refers to the original image--the painting--as the "germ" of the photographic material.