Strangers

This series is entitled “Strangers “ and aims at illustrating the first contact between two beings that don’t know each other. I symbolically work with humans and wild animals that meet each other. The concept is inspired by Hobbes and Rousseau who both described the “state of nature”. According to Hobbes, the human being is profoundly mean and selfish, so that when he first meets someone, he has neither confidence nor sympathy. “The man is a wolf for the man”. On the contrary, Rousseau thinks that the man is innocent and genuine at the state of nature. He first experiences sympathy toward the other humans. The animals and the humans in this series are thus between confidence and suspicion, between curiosity and fear. Some of the animals seem threatening, other seem rather friendly. I photograph them in the animals’ natural environment, and I try to photograph what it is to experience the first contact with someone else, with someone truly different. I want to create stories that intertwine wildlife nature and human imagination.