Eric Pillot, born in 1968, discovered photography later in life, after finishing his scientific studies and working several years as an engineer. He started photographing the animal by chance, by finding some polar bears swimming under water in a glass tank of a zoo one day. He then became interested in the staging of wild animals and the architecture of zoos, which he saw as cultural constructions. After first working in black and white, in 2010 he started a series in color, In situ, made in Europe, which won him the HSBC Photography Prize in 2012.
“The animal fascinates me as a strange, beautiful, and singular being,” he says. “The animal seems very present to me in the spirit of men, and from their most early childhood. To me, the beings that I photograph appear to be able to represent something of ‘the animal in us’, in all its diversity. One that we can pet, pamper, fear… one from tales, myths, and children’s books. The animal is also, for me, symbolically, a face of the ‘other’, an ‘other’ that I see, but that I also let see me, and one which I think gives back something to us.”
In 2015, Eric Pillot extended his work to another culture, that of the United States, within the framework of the Prix de Photographie Marc Ladreit de Lacharrière – Académie des beaux-arts. After having the Mario Giacomelli – Empreintes italiennes exhibition in 2016, l’Orangerie des Musées de Sens today is exhibiting a selection of about sixty prints, mainly in large format, taken from the series In situ -Etats-Unis.
Eric Pillot, In situ 2010-2016
From December 17 through March 27, 2017
Orangerie des Musées de Sens
135, rue des Déportés et de la Résistance
89100 Sens
France
