The Grand Duchy, mainly known for its capital which is teeming with workers, businesses and office buildings, is also dotted with protected environments. These allow fauna and flora to coexist, far from the hustle and bustle of the big city.
It is all the beauty of these environments that photographer Marc Steichen wanted to reveal in his first book, entitled Elements of Nature. In this work, we can discover no less than a hundred photos taken by the artist. Having himself grown up in a village in the Grand Duchy, each photo highlights the nature of Luxembourg and the Greater Region.
We met Marc Steichen, who told us about this book which combines his passion for photography, his deep attraction for the nature around him and his desire to protect it in a general context of threat to biodiversity. Indeed, a Luxembourg study carried out at the end of 2023 revealed that of the 14,669 threatened plant and animal species studied in Europe, almost a fifth of them present a high risk of extinction.
Marc Steichen, you are an amateur photographer. What else do you do for a living?
I’ve been taking photos for almost 30 years now. As an amateur and enthusiast, I take all my photos in my free time. Alongside this passion, I studied chemistry when I was younger and I am currently in teaching, where I obviously give chemistry lessons.
When did you first hold a camera in your hands?
The first time I had a camera was when I was 15, I think. My interest in photography came from a darkroom course that I had the chance to take at the time. I found it magical to see the photo gradually appear on the support. Since then, I haven’t stopped.
Where does this passion for nature come from?
I always grew up in a rural environment, in the countryside, and therefore close to nature. My father was a farmer, so I have always been in touch with the natural environments around me. I have always loved walking in the forest and observing nature. I have been photographing nature intensively for around twenty years now, having photographed all kinds of things.
Hundreds of photos to your credit, and now a book. Explain to us this desire to record your works in a book.
This idea germinated in my mind a while ago, around five or six years ago. The project I had in mind consisted of bringing together a series of photos from our regions (Luxembourg, Belgium and France, also collectively called the “Greater Region”) and articulating them around the theme of the four elements: fire, water, earth and air (a little nod to my scientific profession). Hence the title I chose to give to this book, which contains exactly 132 photos of local flora and fauna. I would say that 95% of these photos come from the Greater Region, while a small 5% are taken from my travels. Some of the photographs are very recent and I took them knowing full well that they would be included in my book. But I dug many other photos from my archives from 15 or 20 years ago, a time in my life when I didn’t yet have this project!
I decided to self-publish this book so that I could have creative freedom. I did everything myself, from the layout of the book to the printing process with a Luxembourg printer. Of course, it requires a lot of work. [rire]but I love learning new things by experiencing them myself.
And now the idea has come to fruition, since I presented this book to the public for the first time about two weeks ago. I plan to present it in other places, notably at the Namur Nature Festival which will take place soon.
What we find beautiful, we generally destroy less.
Mark Steichen
Photographer
What message do you want to convey through your photos?
I always try to show the beauty of nature. That’s my main goal. Other colleagues also show more negative things, such as the impact of man on fauna and flora. But personally, I prefer to raise awareness through positive and aesthetic aspects. What we find beautiful, in general, we destroy less. I see it for example with my children, what they love and find beautiful, they tend to want to protect. In our regions, we obviously have a majority of fairly common species, but the idea is to always raise awareness of the fragility of environments and ecosystems, wherever they are. It must be said that Luxembourg is a country where there is a lot of building because there are more and more people.
Having an ethical approach as a photographer is also something very important to me. I mainly use the hide method for this, I almost never walk around. It involves hiding in the wilderness, in tents, pre-built cabins or even homemade cabins with branches. There can be hours and hours of waiting, but if you let nature take its course, you will be there at the right time. To be completely forgotten, that’s the idea. This necessarily involves spending a lot of time on site, where nothing happens. Until the moment when, if you are in the right place, you have the chance to capture an animal, an interaction, with your lens.
Making hides actually allows animals to be free and behave naturally in their environment. This is why in order to take this kind of photos, you need to have a minimum of knowledge. We must not photograph randomly, we must find out about the behavior of the animals. Afterwards, in our area, we have few dangerous animals, but it is mainly to avoid disturbing them.
You can find the book Elements of Nature directly on the photographer’s website but also soon in all Ernster bookstores in Luxembourg.
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