À l'affût du sauvage | Exposant – Montier Photo Festival

Presentation

Eric MEDARD

France

http://www.ericmedard.com

Photographs

Animal photographer for 30 years and professional for eight years, it’s already all kid that Eric Médard dragged in the woods, looking for the best places for huts perched and he also strolled following small watercourses for fishing. Wildlife photography was the natural extension of these wild excursions and was an additional pretext to continue to build buried, perched and camouflaged blinds. He also likes technical challenges. Photographing bats in flight for example was a challenge that he wanted to achieve, as well as capturing the passage of the marten, the flight of the tawny owl or the diving of the kingfisher…Since then he complicated his photographic approach by taking the same pictures but with infrared lights, for the sake of innovation but also and especially for ethical reasons. Thanks to this new technique, animals no longer detect shots. He particularly likes to photograph the wildlife around him. The animals that live really close to home. In the morning, he puts on his boots, a camera on his shoulder and goes towards the blind installed for several years or just prepared the day before. He likes to show that there is absolutely no need to go far to make pictures of wildlife. His territory is also that of many animals.

After “Le piégeage photographique” his first book relating this photographic technique (photo trapping), then “Libres et sauvages”, auto-editing book about wildlife in the Mayenne department, a collection of ten texts and pictures taken mostly in the West of France and especially in Mayenne, then “Passeurs de Lunes” in co-edition with La Salamandre, “Les plus beaux paysages de la Mayenne en panoramique”, book of landscapes of his department, he just printed a new opus : “A l ‘affût des Sauvages”. This colourful book gathers some of the most beautiful pictures of the last 3 years taken near his home in Mayenne.

Exposition

À l’affût du sauvage

2020 2021 2 | Chapiteau

“A l’affût des Sauvages ” The exhibition with minimal environmental impact! The exhibition that I propose gathers up to 30 color prints in 60/90 cm format, printed on very beautiful paper Hahnemühle German Etching 310 g. For the total respect of the environment, and for not using aluminum in my supports, no plastic for the protection of the prints and therefore minimize the environmental impact of my exhibition, the prints will be presented just suspended and caught by a wooden rod on the top and the bottom of the picture. The photos are hung by a simple cord. Even the wood used for the exhibition wooden sticks is local, taken from an oak from the village where I live and worked by a friend carpenter. As the paper is very thick and rigid, the print remains perfectly flat and it makes a very clean appearance to the exhibition in accordance with the photos presented. Each photo will be accompanied by a rigid support with a legend explainingthe story of the picture, species name and photographic material. In addition, the photos themselves have a minimal CO2 impact. Indeed, nearly all of the images of this project were made really close to my homeand maximum 15 km around then I always rode my bike.

It is therefore a general approach that surrounds this photographic work without forgetting the aesthetic quality of the images. I hardly want to prove that there is no need to go to the other countries to meet the wild and succeed in making photos. However, it may require more time and patience. The choice of the photos was oriented by an artistic bias; to show the animals in pastel, soft, fuzzy atmospheres thanks to the choices of framing and optics used. I wanted to focus on the subject in its environment and where it usually lives. All this photographic work will have been done exclusively in blinds, so as not to interact with the wildlife and thus to photograph them in their privacy, out of respect for them and to change pictures of animals often shown as suspicious.