Animalités

The renewal of reflections on the diversity of living beings has generalized, in the XXIst century, the idea that man is not the center of the world and that his existence is not the end of evolution.

Ethology and cognitive sciences have shown that the existence of sometimes complex cultures was not specific to our species but was found in many other animals. The animals represented in the series belong to all sorts of species, real, fantasized, metaphorical or even artificial beings. They are wild, bred or domesticated, free or captive. Living they are proliferating, rare, endangered. Dead they are used as food, trophies, decorative objects or fetishes. They are familiar, irritating, reassuring or disturbing. The exhibition does not propose an answer to the questions raised by the relationship between man and other animals, but invites reflection and eventually contributes to the elaboration, by the visitor, of his own opinion.

The pretext of the images can be a familiar animal, a stalk in relation to a territory or an idea, the chance of an encounter. Sometimes the photograph is staged, artificially posed, massively retouched, even fabricated. Sometimes the animal is a subject among others, it can belong to the personal mythology of the photographer.