The Edition

François Halard’s Conversation With Claude began at Giverny, in Normandy, France, in the garden Claude Monet made his own and painted for more than thirty years. Halard arrived with a Polaroid camera, creating images that were later scanned, enlarged, cropped, and painted by hand. Through this process, the photographs become something less certain—part image, part painting, and part memory of the moment in which they were made.

Giverny is not an ordinary landscape. It is a landscape already shaped by another artist’s way of seeing. Monet planted it, composed it, waited for it, and returned to it again and again, until the garden became inseparable from the paintings he created there.

Halard photographs the landscape with an awareness of this history. Rather than attempting to create new Monet paintings or simply document the garden as it exists today, he looks at what Monet once looked at, allowing his own eye and hand to enter the image.

This is what makes the title Conversation With Claude particularly fitting. The conversation takes place not through words, but through color, light, water, reflection, and the act of looking again. Two artists, separated by more than a century, meet within the same garden, with the photographs becoming what remains of that encounter.

The book includes a foreword by opera director Vincent Huguet.

Publication Details: Conversation With Claude is published by Libraryman and edited and designed by Tony Cederteg. The book measures 25 × 30.5 cm and contains 102 pages, including printed endpapers, with 65 color plates. It is offset printed as a paperbound hardcover with linen thread binding and a translucent dust cover. The first edition is limited to 1,500 copies, with a special edition of 50 numbered copies accompanied by a signed original print. The release date is November 1, 2026.