At the end of the guns

“It was summer, we were crouching in the shadows and the dust. She spoke of oryx until the gong sounded. She called her series "conservation" because she told about the complexity of saving species. I did not know then about the price of the heads.

She had worked on ivory trafficking in Zimbabwe and Cameroon and she had met Marty. They had shared the bush with elephants, poachers and rangers. Marty had killed some before but he wanted this one helpless because the price was better. They had been walking for weeks and throwing ashes in the wind. She had stayed. Was she crazy? Later she had spoken of loneliness. Of his anguish at not having done enough. Of freedom. In Texas, South Africa, Colombia or Brittany, she had measured the complexity of balances. She then pitched her tent with the smugglers, spent nights watching drunk men shoot rabbits and a woman pissing in her cafe. She had published her images in Liberation and VSD, edited a book at Actes Sud and was preparing for a mission for National Geographic.

She also had sentences of silence. Sentences which said that the woman had, one day, capsized because she could not forget the sublime moment when the elephant had collapsed.

Quickly, we decided to exhibit it; until the last day of the year, everything was still possible. Hunting seemed like a good subject, dangerous, of course, but we were used to it. "

Celine Duval

Curator: Céline Duval
Scenography: Étienne Andréys

Melanie wenger is a documentary photographer represented by the agency Cosmos based in Brussels. A graduate in Letters and a Masters in journalism, she chose to tell stories of men, of ordinary heroes, to reveal their depth through the permanent immediacy of photography. Without forgetting the roughness, above all, which makes them so unique.

In 2011, she started working on the series " Wasted Young Libya ”(The Broken Childhood of Free Libya) which took him three years. Between 2014 and 2016, she worked on migration between Libya, Malta and Belgium.

For his series " Lost in migration »She spent 6 months in immersion in a reception center for asylum seekers with mental suffering. In parallel, she works on ivory trafficking and the wild animal industry in Cameroon, Zimbabwe, Texas and South Africa. She follows rangers, poachers, endangered species hunters, attends major international fairs and private owners. Series " bush babies »Is exhibited in New York and published in VSD and Le Figaro Magazine. Between 2014 and 2017, she produced a long-term documentary series in the privacy of an isolated elderly person in Brittany: "Marie-Claude", she is the 2017 laureate of the HSBC Prize for Photography and publishes a monograph of the same title at Actes Sud in July 2017. The series also received the Jury Prize of the Grand Prix Photographique de Bretagne in November 2017 in Morlaix.