Many photographers have a muse, or a subject that inspires their passion for image-making. For Roeselien Raimond, it’s foxes. It’s been over a decade since she first began photographing the wild creatures, and during that time, she’s snapped 64 fox faces. To demonstrate the breadth of her portraiture, she’s arranged them all in a dazzling eight-by-eight photo mosaic. Some of the portraits show foxes giving a steely-eyed stare while there are others who have clearly found their moment of zen. Together, the many images represent the nuances found among the fascinating creatures.
Raimond’s passion for foxes has inspired her to contemplate the idiosyncrasies of each portrait. In looking at her impressive collection of images, there are personality archetypes that the foxes fall into. The photographer even identified 12 “types” of foxes and wrote about their character traits in 2016. Since then, she’s expanded on that and has lovingly begun to sort them into even more groups. One is The Flatheads, which don’t have anything flat about them at all; they have very round features. The other group is The Longnoses, which have “exceptionally long noses” along with elongated pointy ears.
To our untrained eye, all foxes might look the same. But for Raimond, it’s as easy to tell them apart as people. “Just as you don’t usually confuse your neighbor with your uncle, the fox in the coastal area looks different from the fox in the forest. Each fox has its own face,” she says. “One has chocolate eyes, the other golden yellow. Some foxes have the cutest little eyebrows or very long whiskers, beautiful eyeliner, or strikingly white cheeks. But above all, they all have different expressions.”
Scroll down to see more of Raimond’s fox portraits. You’ll never look at them the same way again.