Margot Wallard: Natten

French photographer Margot Wallard’s (born 1978) Natten is a heartfelt response to the experience of witnessing her brother’s slow and untimely death, an experience she described as a “violent process” for all concerned.

Undertaken in the wake of loss, and fraught with the contradictions of mourning, Natten is a post-traumatic visual exploration and an attempt to reaffirm and claim life. It is comprised of images of dead birds, mice, frogs, snakes and stoats; black-and-white photos of ice formations in woodland areas mingled with ghostly nighttime nudes (self-portraits); images of insects; color landscape sequences in which nude self-portraits again figure; a series of images of animal skeletons; and still lifes of natural mineral and botanical formations. “The dead animals or the organic elements found during my expeditions constantly referred me to this notion of perpetual renewal,” Wallard writes, “to this contradiction between normality and the brutality of life.”