J.-M. Philippoz, Rawyl, 21.09.2011

My father is a hunter, like his father before him. On Saturday evenings, at the kitchen table, my mother would pour another cup of coffee to the guests as my father was recalling the anecdote of the first deer he killed or that doe he shot at dusk but didn’t catch. Followed by stories about his military service, usually. I grew up with those tales and the recurring annual excitement of the approaching hunting season. As a child, I firmly boycotted my father’s passion, which I perceived as a barbarian heritage.

In autumn 2011, nevertheless, I decided to follow my father on a hunting day for the first time, both out of curiosity and with the secret aim to film a macho killer. Most surprisingly to me, the images proved to be much more complex than I expected: an interesting tension exists between the cliché of a macho hunter and the sensual postures of a man crawling, between the figure of the predator and the loving looks my father gives to the camera – to me. The video J.-M. Philippoz, Rawyl, 21.09.2011 shows a short sequence of that hunting day.