Selected as one of the ten showcases from the Annual submission entry 'Women', Margot Wallard in the series 'Natten', presents the camera as both shield against, and investigator of death; poetised in nature.
Margot Wallard
I started Natten after the release of my book My Brother Guillaume and Sonia (Journal, Sweden 2013) on the death of my brother and his girlfriend.
In the project Natten I wanted and needed to change totally my way of taking pictures. I felt a pressing need to turn the camera onto myself and started for the first time to make self-portraits. I needed to tame my new surroundings in the Värmland region of Sweden. A place, in the middle of nowhere both geographically and mentally, where I moved in 2012.
I used my body as a farewell song and the camera as a shield against the pain caused by the death of my Brother and his partner. I use a medium format to oblige myself to be more quiet and slow. I needed to look death in the face; I found in nature a way of re-poetising it, a place and a quiet calm where I could express the process of questioning what I had just been through.
I recorded reality, expressed in its purest form, I scans the things around me the organic material, vegetable or mineral and dead animals I found on my expeditions. By using this means of recording reality in its pure expression, I find a different way of coming to grips with it.
All images © Margot Wallard.
To see more of Margot’s work, click here.
