It was in 2002, during a stay in Tanzania, that Laurent Baheux, struck by the beauty of wildlife as well as by its fragility, began a photographic work that would become over the years a hymn to wildlife and a militant act for the preservation of biodiversity.
Taken in several countries in East Africa and Southern Africa, his images depict a world preserved but on borrowed time. There is nothing blissful about his vision, however, and is not just a nostalgic apology for a lost Eden: danger, violence, death, if they are never exhibited, seem omnipresent and sensitive.
Coming from reportage and mainly from sports photography, Laurent Baheux excels in capturing action scenes, animal movement in its natural context; but it is above all his portraits that place us in astonishing proximity to the subject. This is not only due to the use of the lens: through the posture, the expression, the look, these "faces", detached from their environment, place us in an unusual intimacy with the bodies at the same time as they seem to confront us with animal thought. Yet this thought remains inaccessible to us and retains its mystery because the author knows how to avoid this anthropocentrism that taints so many animal documentaries. These beasts are neither objects – even if they are of admiration – nor substitutes for humans.
The choice of b&w allows to sublimate the beauty of the bodies, to avoid any anecdotal aspect, to play on the graphic force offered by the shadows, the silhouettes against the light, the zebras stripes, the spots of the leopards. The vision proposed by Laurent Baheux oscillates between that of the generic animal captured in its environment, perceived as part of a perfectly regulated system, and that of the individual surprised in a private life that seems to escape the determination of the species. It thus places us at the heart of a complex definition of the animal condition.