The magazine of the photo-essay
October 2020 back issue
“A free, really high quality photo-essay magazine. Fabulous!”
Stephen Fry. British actor, writer and film maker
For the last 20 years James Hill has been photographing life at his wife’s ancestral home
in France, the Chateau de Maillebois.
Surrounded by a walled park, the property is an island of the past caught in the present.
The images, both tender and whimsical, explore the plethora of emotions that come
from living in a house bearing so much history and how the family and the local
community interact with it. The photographer watches his family in their role as
temporary custodians of the castle, attempting to maintain its traditions and carry them
into an uncertain future.
“The incessant flurries of rain and wind, which have for centuries swept in from the Atlantic
across Normandy, have barely marked the castle’stowers,leaving instead a peculiar patina,
equally rough and smooth to the touch, its pitted surface beneath my fingers a humbling
reminder of how long this resilient building has stood here. Patterned blocks of flint stand
proudly in the façade like pieces of armour. Even the low wallsin front of the house,tracing
the massive outline ofthe castle that existed before angry crowds of the French Revolution
destroyed what stood above, wear the dignity of old scars.” James Hill
by James Hill
