The Family Album of Wild Africa by Laurent Baheux.
WITHIN LAURENT BAHEUX LIES A BURNING DESIRE TO PRESERVE NATURE’S PRIMITIVE SPECTACLE AND TAKE ACTION FOR THE PROTECTION OF ANIMALS, WHICH HE DOES BY BREATHING SOUL AND INDIVIDUALITY INTO HIS SUBJECTS.
In The Family Album of Wild Africa series, he portrays the intimate bond between the mammals of the Dark Continent and the human race. By emphasising an expression or a posture, he allows the viewer to make their own interpretation, rather than imposing a documentary vision.
“I take photographs based on my gut instinct. For me, the thing that matters the most is the connection.”
His meticulously contrasted portraits draw their inspiration from the grand portrait tradition of the 19th century, while the scenes in Cinemasope offer a dramatic and grandiose vista. Following in the steps of his predecessors, Laurent Baheux favors black and white, which concentrates the view on the essence of the scene, rather than distracting from it through the use of color. The graphic beauty of a zebra’s coat or a giraffe silhouette gives substance to his fine-tuned compositions, where the shapes of the animals and the natural world respond to one another and become intertwined. Laurent Baheux gives us a series of chance encounters in The Family Album of Wild Africa, at times funny and moving, but always intense. It is a book that challenges our perception of animals, placing them in our own personal world as companions to the snapshots and photo albums of our lives.
The Family Album of Wild Africa -teNeues & YellowKorner co-editions
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