Shelter  is a photographic series that at first glance seems to offer us a familiar scene, it could be our own home with its mist, forests and scattered houses. In fact, this series of fading colors seems keen to tell a story about an imaginary place, or more specifically about the imagination. The landscapes are ripe with possible tragedies: a collapsed hut, fallen trees, cats spying on passers-by... Oddly enough, we get the impression that everything we see is frozen in silence. A little as if we were grappling with images from a walking dream, a sort of hallucination.

Everything seems even stranger when one realizes that we are not the ones looking, we are being watched, even spied on, by every being and it feels like a nightmare. Passers-by stalked by cats: that’s us. Zombies frozen cold by a sad little girl: that’s us. Intruders kept at a distance from a deer observing them from the other side of a fence: that’s us, hidden behind vegetation that throws obstacles in our path, sometimes impenetrable walls... Observees rather then observers and stuck in a ghostly reality, we lose all bearings - starting with the sensation of time...

- Maëlle Collin

Maëlle Collin (b. 1989) is a Belgian photographer currently based in New York City. She graduated from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels in 2013 with an MFA in visual arts / photography.

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