Jeremy Piloquet doesn’t like shooting people. Cows, he says, will always be more honest. “When I started out three years ago, I tried street photography, but I was so much more drawn to people’s shadows or silhouettes, their outline from behind – or, even better, when there was no one around. With social media and selfie culture, people are always trying to show their best smile, their best selves. I don’t like that. Animals don’t perform – they act just as they are.”
Piloquet took this picture of the herd when returning from his local rubbish dump, having spent a summer’s day emptying his garage. He stayed on his side of the fence, pulled up some grass and lured them over with words of encouragement: “Come on, girl” and, “Time to eat.”
“I was out running errands, so didn’t have my proper camera with me, but my phone does the job well enough,” he says, adding that his choice of Chinese phone was intentional, having become frustrated with Samsung battery life and iOS software on iPhones. “And it’s much cheaper.”
Once he returned home, about an hour from the seaside town of Les Sables-d’Olonne on the west coast of France, he applied a black and white filter using the Snapseed app. “I love shooting in moody light. The clouds were low and heavy, and the filter emphasised them and the cows’ expressions. Blue sky just wouldn’t have given the same impression. Here, there is drama.”
