This is the first iteration of an ongoing project that I hope, will last for the next 10-20-30 years of my life.

My hometown is only 3 hours away from the middle of the Gaspésie region, yet, I haven’t been able to enjoy and experience enough of what Gaspésie has to offer growing up. I am pretty familiar with the very strong culture overthere, as a lot of my friends come from there, but because of a lack of knowledge, and I shamefully have to admit it, a lack of interest, I wasn’t able to link this specific culture with the territory they live in.

For the first time in too many years, I hit the road to reach Murdochville, a very small town deep in the heart of the mountains of Gaspésie. Murdochville was created in the 1950’s by a mining company in order to create a giant open “pit mine”. The village reached 6000 living souls in the 80’s until the mining company stopped its operations in 2003 which, in turn, created a massive exodus. Since then, Murdoch has been able to « survive » because of the wind industry and by trying to hang on to tourism. We can now count less than 600 citizens in the village.

As for me, in the recent years, I have become very interested, and concerned, about what I eat and the relationship I have with food, which has always been more than complicated. Harvesting my own food became the answer to every problem related to my tumultuous relationship to food, mainly for ethical reasons and for health concerns.

Consequently, my interest in hunting grew. For those who know me well, this is probably the strangest passion I could possibly develop. I used to be a vegetarian for almost 10 years, I am pretty sensitive when it comes to blood, and I like animals to an extent that can’t be described with words.

So I took my first real « adventure hunting » trip in Gaspésie. 40kms of forest away from that ghost town that reminded me very strongly of my adventures in the deserts of America’s west coast.

As I immediately fell in love with the territory, I understood the emptiness left by the exodus of the region by my Gaspesian friends who mostly now all live in Montreal.

During my career as a photographer, I was never compelled to go out and shoot candidly. However, I now feel connected to people and places in a way I have never felt before. I plan on documenting the vernacular aspect of hunting, but specifically in relationship with this enigmatic region and its wilderness, which is almost impossible to find anywhere else in the province of Québec, at least, not on that scale.

Honestly, I haven’t felt more alive both as a human and as a photographer for a while now. I haven’t felt this compelled to show the world what could be perceived as nothingness. And nothingness is probably the most important thing to embrace when you find yourself sitting on the wet lichen of a wild forest at 4 in the morning, with nothing else around than bears trying to bulk up for the upcoming winter, moose trying to survive after their mating period, the constant choir of the coyotes and a night so dark you can almost touch a bit of that « nothingness ».

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