Raised in the countryside with a pony, a goat, a rabbit and a dog, Laurent Baheux left this joyful companionship upon becoming an adult in order to write sports articles for a Parisian newspaper which soon also began commissioning pictures. He became passionately involved in this new discipline, to the point of developing his own photos, while acquiring a distinct taste for strongly contrasting black and white shots that have become his signature. In 2002, he set foot on African soil for the first time, in Tanzania, with the aim of encountering the wild life and large mammals he had dreamed of since his childhood. He immediately had the strange impression that this place had always been embedded in his consciousness. He savored the extraordinary feeling of being the guest and tolerated intruder into the territory of each stunning wild animal. At that time, for the sheer pleasure of the experience, he began a collection of images that he has constantly enriched ever since. It was however much later – at the request of one of his friends – that he exhibited his first pictures and was overwhelmed by his first encounter with the public:
