Artist Spotlight – Guillaume Petermann

Guillaume Petermann is a French documentary photographer based in Brussels, who combines a photojournalist’s eye with the formal sensibility of portraiture and landscape to explore the relationship between people, nature and the world’s cultures. He contributes regularly to publications such as The Guardian, GEO Ado and Asian Geographic, and among his awards is an Honorable Mention as part of the URBAN Animals project (Exhibit Around / Trieste Photo Days, 2025), which first brought his project Harar: The Pact of the Hyenas to our attention.

Shot in eastern Ethiopia in 2023, the project documents a centuries-old bond between the inhabitants of Harar and the spotted hyenas that roam the outskirts of this UNESCO-listed walled city. Every evening, Abbas Saleh, known as the Hyena Man, calls the hyenas by name into the darkness, and up to forty of them emerge from the shadows to feed from his hands, in a ritual passed down through generations. In the video interview, Petermann speaks firsthand about what it was like to document this nocturnal ritual and the emotions he experienced coming face to face with these fascinating predators, inviting us to reflect on what it truly means to share a city with the wild.