A marmot trophy. The hunting of marmots has been forbidden since 2009 in the region of Fribourg.

As nature intended

Brown beady eyes gaze out from a face so sweet it almost disguises what lies beneath: a marmot has been severed at the torso, and mounted to a board. This trophy captures something essential about Laurence Kubski’s practice, which turns on the charged, often uneasy ground where human culture meets the animal world. Sauvages, her second monograph, continues in pursuit of that tension.

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Switzerland is home to more than 204 species
of land snail, 40% of which are threatened.

Text by Edie Musker

In the tradition of Western binarisms, “nature” exists as raw material, the untamed opposition of manufactured culture. This essentialism creates an uncanny aspect in the images of Laurence Kubski’s Sauvages (2024): the wild creature is taken out of the landscape and put somewhere it doesn’t belong. Huntsmen and birdwatchers stand prone in fields like animals. Human beings, both creators of the scene and ransackers of the landscape which supported life, replace the rolling hills and rivers that the wild creatures should be calling home.

Part documentary, part staged scene; these are not passive images. Kubski’s lens constructs unexpected groupings: on one page, a swarm of bullets; on another, tiny frogs crawl over an oversized hand. Each photograph, positioned with a collector’s obsessive gaze, asks who keeps what, and who serves whom. The viewer is left to wonder whether the wild still exists at all. .

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Window stickers to prevent bird collisions.

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Male Alpine newts.

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In taxidermy, glass eyes are used because organs, such as the tongue, can not be preserved chemically. Here are the large brown eyes of bears, those of birds, which range from brown to pale yellow, passing through red, the vertical split of reptile pupils and certain eyes belonging to mammals, like the fox.

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Common frogs at the final stage of metamorphosis, in June.

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As nature intended