1Having grown up in France, I never really had the opportunity to get close to elephants before moving to Laos in 1999. In fact, when I first came to the country formerly known as “the million elephants and the white parasol” (lan xang hom khao), their presence was already discrete. And for a long time, my contact with these animals was mostly by chance. A few fortuitous encounters with mahouts and their elephants on the roads of northern Laos were enough to stimulate my curiosity about the relationship between humans and these extraordinary animals. 

2In 2004, I undertook a visit to the region of Hongsa, famous for its large elephant population. At that time, travelling to Hongsa was a real expedition. A large part of the road had not yet been paved, and the trip was made either on the terribly dusty tracks of the dry season or the muddy and sometimes impractical ones of the rainy season. These harsh conditions made me realize that the most appropriate way to get to this remote district was to travel by elephant!

3During one of my first stays in Hongsa, I met a mahout named Pheng and Mae Bouakham, his elephant. Pheng and I became close friends. And thanks to his help, I was able to undertake a lengthy photographic assignment in the villages and forests of the province of Sayaboury. Several stays in the area allowed me to explore in more detail the astonishing proximity mahouts have with the largest of the land mammals. For nearly ten years, I documented the various activities of village life in which elephants participated. If logging is an important part of my images, it is because during those years it was the main occupation of both men and elephants.

Figure 1. Serie Of Elephants and Men.

4At that time, I was mainly photographing in argentic and in black and white. A little before coming to Laos, I had exchanged my SLR camera—24x36—for a medium format camera—6x6—very compact and easy to handle, perfect for reportage. In order to maintain an aesthetic continuity with my first Laotian images—mainly portraits and scenes of life, as well as a series on rice cultivation—the square image format (6x6) and black and white were naturally imposed for this new project. 

5Later, at exhibitions where I was invited to display my work, it was often pointed out to me that the black and white made my elephant images difficult to date: that they could just as easily have been taken at the beginning of the 20th century or even earlier. This impression of timelessness is further emphasized by the fact that in Laos, forestry work employs few modern machines and equipment. My photos are a reflection of their time; they show a reality in decline. In the course of a few decades, most of the nation-states in the region have taken measures to conserve biodiversity and have banned—or minimized—logging. The resulting loss of income has gradually led people to employ elephants in other tasks, mainly in tourism, a buoyant economic sector, until the recent Covid pandemic. At the same time, probably because elephants were becoming more visible and accessible, many journalists and tourists drew the attention of the general public to the arduousness of logging and even more so to the mistreatment of these animals. While being considered a living God and companion for many peoples in Southeast and South Asia, the elephant can also be the object of culturally institutionalized mistreatment. Today, there are countless press articles, reports and videos widely circulated on social networks which reference this problem, but at the same time project a very biased Western vision of the elephant situation in Asia.

Figure 2. Serie Of Elephants and Men.

6My photos do not aim to fall into this stumbling block nor condemn local practices. My curiosity led me to take an interest in these practices from the inside, and to confront generalized discourses and prejudices with the reality of the field. 

7I had become aware of the existence of elephant abuse even before I started photographing. One of my previous travels in Southeast Asia took me to northern Thailand to visit an elephant hospital located between Lampang and Chang Mai. Shortly before I went there, the hospital had attracted international media attention because it had taken in and equipped Motala, an elephant in her fifties who had lost a foot after stepping on an anti-personnel mine in Burma. On the day I visited, the hospital had no patients. I saw neither elephants nor veterinary care, but I was able to visit the facilities. A notebook available to visitors allowed me to read the history of all the elephants treated at the hospital. One story, in particular, caught my attention. Some Buddhist monks had bought a young male elephant to use in the construction of a pagoda. Once his participation in the construction of the temple was completed, the monks illegally rented him out to work in the logging industry. A few years later, alerted by the police, the provincial veterinary services had recovered this elephant in a state of advanced malnutrition and unable to walk. His mahouts were forcing him to work more than ten hours a day and were not providing him with enough food.

Figure 3. Serie Of Elephants and Men.

Figure 4. Serie A fleur de peau.

8To prevent him from escaping their mistreatment, they tied him up at night. And in order to maintain good work performance, the mahouts compensated for his lack of food by giving him high doses of amphetamines. The veterinarian’s intervention saved his life. After receiving treatment, the animal managed to recover physically, but it seems that it was marked by this experience and lost the ability to communicate with its congeners. 

9Having this story in mind, I started shooting. However, during the ten years spent photographing people and elephants in their daily tasks, I never witnessed any violence towards animals. Nor did I ever seek to photograph such situations. This choice was made not to deny the existence of such practices but because my experience in the field has allowed me to understand that violence against Asian elephants is not necessary. So rather than denouncing situations of mistreatment—mistreatment that can be similar to those we see in the West or elsewhere with domestic animals involved in our economic activities—I preferred to document what we could call good practices, which reveal the intimacy between a mahout and his elephant. In my opinion, cultural knowledge and local practices should not be considered a priori as favouring animal exploitation. On the contrary, any long-established interspecific relationship should be considered capable of guaranteeing the conditions for harmonious coexistence between humans and animals, notably through work. This is what is shown in the works that have nourished my photography; I am thinking of those of the sociologist Jocelyne Porcher, who conducts research on animal husbandry (Porcher, 2017) or Nicolas Lainé’s work on Asian elephants (Lainé, 2020). 

10Far from the images and representations of violence and abuse of elephants portrayed in the West, the daily efforts of Pheng and his mahout friends demonstrate practices that respect the needs and rhythms of elephant life. The income generated from logging supports their families. Without elephants, they simply could not work or benefit from this resource. Securing their income is not the only reason for the care and consideration they give to their fellow workers. The benevolent attitude of these mahouts is an expression of mutual knowledge and trust, qualities which make coexistence with elephants possible. Ultimately, it is this shared interspecies relationship that I have attempted to capture in my photographs. I entitled my first series: “Des éléphants et des hommes—(Of elephants and men)”.

11In 2009, after several years spent photographing men and elephants at work in the Laotian forests, I took some close-up photos of an elephant’s skin while trying out a new digital camera. Unlike my medium format film camera, this digital SLR allowed me to use a macro lens. The first images I got were so surprising that I decided to explore the aesthetic possibilities offered by macro photography. To do this, I had to get much closer than usual to the elephants, sometimes holding my lens at a distance of only a few centimetres. In the beginning, this approach was not very comfortable. Closing one eye, fixing the other in the viewfinder, concentrating on the framing, limiting your field of vision to a few centimetres of skin and not seeing anything else of the animal implies a loss of reference points. The abandonment of the peripheral vision, so sensitive to movements, does not allow it to anticipate those of the elephant. Photographing in these conditions requires a renunciation of our instinct of preservation in the face of the dangers that the proximity to such a powerful animal can represent for humans. But thanks to the complicity of my mahout friends, who watched me evolve and grow close to their elephants with an amused eye, I quickly succeeded in overcoming these first apprehensions to explore the animal in its smallest details by playing with the forms and the materials that my new photographic material offered to my glance. The result is the series of images “A fleur de peau—(Skin deep)”. 

Figure 5. Serie A fleur de peau.

12My photos are directed at the general public. The series on the shared life of humans and elephants aims to raise awareness of the risk of the disappearance of this multi-millennial way of life. The close-up images place the public within reach of the elephant and invite them to feel its surprising sensuality made of incredible landscapes. 

Figure 6. Serie A fleur de peau.