HUN began as a problem of looking. Julia Mejnertsen, a Danish photographer born in 1983, spent years examining how we perceive nature, and she found her subject close at hand: her mother’s hunting practice. The book, published in 2024 by Dalpine with Fiebre Photobook, gathers that long-term research into nine chapters, moving among elephant sketches, photographs of animals and nature made at the zoo, snapshots drawn from the family album, hunting scenes, and a conversation between mother and daughter. What might have been a straightforward documentary about the hunt becomes instead an inquiry into the bonds and frictions inside a family, and into the psychological cost of a relation to other living forms that has gone wrong.
Mejnertsen’s method is accumulation rather than argument. The nine chapters hold unlike materials in suspension, so the reader assembles the meaning. Zoo animals and hunted animals, domestic memory and field documentation, drawing and photograph: each register comments on the others. Her concern is not only personal. She argues that white, western societies have structured and shaped the world’s cultural understanding of nature, and the book tests that claim at the scale of one household. An essay by the French naturalist Grégoire Loïs extends the frame; the design and editorial work of Ricardo Báez, visualization by Sergio Valenzuela-Escobedo, and scanning and pre-press by La Troupe give the sequence its composure.
The 2024 publication turns this research into a 268-page softcover in English, measuring 17 by 23 centimetres. Its varied materials ask for different kinds of attention: an inherited photograph carries a different authority from an observation made at a zoo, while a drawing introduces another way to imagine an animal. The book shared the Grand Prix at the 2025 Maribor Photobook Award with JT’s Wild Grass.
For collectors, HUN is worth examining for the relationship between its intimate subject and its wider questions about nature. Family photographs, hunting scenes and institutional displays bring competing ways of seeing animals into the same sequence. Its interest lies in those changes of context and in the tension between a daughter’s inquiry and a mother’s practice; the physical book gives readers room to compare them without reducing the family relationship to a single verdict.
