The Hunters.
The series “The Hunters, Out of Time” explores hunting with hounds, a practice whose dress, etiquette and rules are rooted in centuries-old traditions.
Made up of candid scenes photographed between 2016 and 2020, the series can sometimes feel like a journey back in time.
Riders, horses and hounds move through landscapes that seem familiar from nineteenth-century engravings.
Read more
Yet this world is very much contemporary.
In France, hunting with hounds remains a living but controversial practice. Its aristocratic heritage, the pursuit of the animal until its death, and the highly visible nature of its rituals continue to provoke opposition.
But it is precisely the persistence of these rituals that interests me here.
The dress of the hunting parties, their social codes, gestures and language, and the relationships between people, horses and hounds lend these scenes a strange sense of timelessness.
As the series unfolds, however, the hunters cease to be its only protagonists. The forest, the animals, tracks and signs gradually take their place. The landscape is no longer merely the setting for the hunt: it becomes a space in which the different presences moving through it appear and disappear.
Between ritual and nature, appearances and traces, the series explores the survival of an ancient world within the contemporary landscape and, more broadly, our ambiguous relationship with the animal world.
