In the Vosges with the great animal photographer Vincent Munier

From our special correspondent Vincent Jolly (text) and Emanuele Scorcelletti (photos)

“You see, during the confinement, at least there were no traces in the sky. Standing on a rock piercing vegetation scorched by the first rays of the sun, Vincent Munier points to the long white streaks that scratch the light blue of the celestial vault. We guess that these last eighteen months have not completely displeased the photographer. The Covid-19 arose shortly after the culmination of his last quest: the snow leopard. And if there is one thing to remember from the film made with his companion Marie Amiguet, it is that Vincent Munier is a creature of solitude. A being who must have a very lively inner life, like analysis, admiring, his companion from the heights Sylvain Tesson, who was able to accompany him and discover the motionless pleasures of the lookout.

Read alsoTibet: with Sylvain Tesson, in the footsteps of the snow leopard

The lookout, Munier practice since childhood. It was in the Vosges, in the midst of almost Canadian scenery, that he took his first photos of wildlife. First it was that of a deer. She was blurry. Since then, he has learned to take stock. Not all the time, by the way. Because anyone who has been able to capture the Arctic wolf, invisible for decades, or the cranes of Hokkaido in their amorous courtship dance, has long since freed himself from all stylistic barriers. Blur, sharp, close-up, landscape, camera trap, telephoto, on the lookout or on the approach, in color or in black and white...

Daily getaways

Everything suits him as long as he can bear witness to the wild world. “I even do black and white in color sometimes,” he jokes, referring to his images of a white, very white world. Freedom and sensitivity at the heart of its success.

This October morning, we found him at home before dawn broke. The full moon still illuminated the winding road that descends from Haut-du-Tôt, near Sapois, to his house: an old barn that he renovated himself; the perfect lair for his getaways in nature. He is just coming back. “It was amazing, I really came back for you,” he confides, offering us a cup of coffee. One would swear to perceive a hint of regret in his voice which seems to know only the register of the whisper – the habit of lying in wait, no doubt. "Come on, let's go, otherwise, we'll miss the sunrise. He grabs his cameras, zips up a little down jacket, grabs a backpack hanging on a wall where old maps are hanging, and jumps into his van housing the rest of his gear.

Back on his rock on the Vosges ridges swept by the gusts, Munier observes an autumn already well underway. "It's almost like the first day of winter," he feels. The gusts of a cold wind make it sway on its perch, while it tries to follow the flight of a bird; these gusts which gradually begin to strip the forest. As if to prepare it to welcome its snowpack. "We're going to go find the traps now," Munier tells us. As much to link the useful to the pleasant. He asks us half-word not to reveal the exact valleys where he has camped for sometimes six or seven years with his traps, which he skilfully camouflages by recovering the transport shells of the boxes on which he glues lichen and twigs.

Thirst for discovery

"If I have a wolf thanks to you, it's champagne," he says, checking the contents of a trap he left in the same place for three months. “I find them with Google Maps markers. Let's be honest: there is always a good deal of luck in so-called wildlife photography. In addition with the use of traps. But luck alone is not enough: you have to know and analyze your environment to try to predict the passage of wildlife. In this regard, Marie Amiguet's film offers several wonderful sequences on this aspect of Munier's work.

It would be unfair to reduce this semi-wild boy to the simple status of a wildlife photographer or – worse – a traveling photographer. In this era when everyone is quick to overuse and seize the words "adventure", "travel" and "exploration" to halo themselves with the magic they contain, Munier's approach leads back to literal definitions of these terms. "For the explorer, adventure is simply an unwanted interruption of his serious work", wrote in his diary Roald Amundsen, who discovered the South Pole. “He's not looking for thrills, but for facts about the unknown. And that's a bit of what we find in Vincent Munier: this thirst for discovering the world that can only be quenched by meticulous preparation and very specific know-how.

Explorers drew maps of unexplored worlds out of white; Munier brings out from the whiteness of nature unknown or poorly known creatures, invisible to the naked eye and that we rediscover under a new look. Unlike this Instagram world in which we live, he does not struggle like others to tell his own legend for fear that no one will do it for him.

“Ghosts of the Arctic”

His images are enough because they are the fruit of work and not of vanity: it was after six years of expeditions, on skis and sleds, often alone in the middle of the steppes, that he managed to capture these images of the "ghosts of the Arctic".

For the snow leopard, the exercise was similar: six trips to Tibet since 2011 only to encounter it for the first time in 2016, almost a quarter of a century after the animal was first caught. times in picture by George B. Schuller. Published on the cover of National Geographic, the historical image is a bit crude and does not tell the same poetry as those reported by Munier. "I don't really like portraits," he says. I like having a large landscape with a small animal presence that we notice at some point. For example, this photo of the panther, sitting like a sphinx in front of a cliff. Its fur makes it almost invisible, and it takes several seconds to realize that the feline is there – plunging its eyes into the photographer's lens.

There remains a paradox, with Vincent Munier. And the photographer knows it. His images, sublime, do not only bear witness to a wild and marvelous world. They are guilty despite themselves of arousing in the general public the desire to go and see this natural world for themselves.

Simplicity and sincerity

This almost ethical conflict can be found in other photographers of the same caliber as him – like Michael Nick Nichols, whom Munier esteems. Only a handful of men have the backbone and the know-how to go alone in the Arctic or Tibet for several months. And before the heyday of mass travel, these happy few were the only ones to get this privilege of accessing these remote areas and the treasures they hold. Now, cruise liners criss-cross the Southern and Arctic Oceans and the advent of low cost is flooding every region of the globe with rushing crowds, leaving as quickly as they arrived.

“I know it can seem arrogant: going to these incredible places, taking pictures and then telling people not to go there, confides Munier. But it is important to understand that we are not going there just anyhow. “Anyone, anytime, anyhow and anywhere: this is indeed the meaning of the time. “It's a bit sad. But if you really want to protect this planet and nature, you have to learn to give up certain things. And return to a certain form of simplicity, of sincerity too. Two feelings that we find in each of Vincent Munier's photographs, whatever the place, whatever the subject.

As we leave the Vosges peaks that he knows by heart, but which continue to amaze him as on the first day, we ask him if – all the same –, despite a confinement that he has lived quite well, the call of the wide does not begin to be felt. "A little, necessarily", concedes, not without a touch of melancholy, the one who focuses on the release of the film. One of his next projects? The Vosges forests, precisely.

The Snow Panther, by Marie Amiguet, with Vincent Munier and Sylvain Tesson, in theaters on December 15.

Also read the beautiful book adapted from the story of Sylvain Tesson, La Panthère des neiges, with a hundred unpublished photographs with captions (Gallimard, 240 p., €29.90).