MENTHE Photograph - Limited Edition of 25

LOCAL Art LOCAL Business LOCAL Photojournalist Melissa Raton is a horse owner, photojournalist and the founder of Maison Raton. She was gifted her first horse 25 years ago, when she was 15, and used to compete nationally at endurance riding in her native Scotland. Her horses are part of her family and she has never sold one. Melissa started working with horses at 12 years old - after school, at weekends and during the holidays. She has worked in all types of equestrian establishments from riding stables, livery stables, racing stables and competition yards in Scotland to polo farms and cattle ranches in the USA. Melissa has a BA (Hons) in Photojournalism from London College of Communication - part of University of the Arts London. She has spent the last 16 years working as a freelance photojournalist and features writer for prominent country sports, equestrian and rural life magazines in the UK, EU, USA and Australasia. She also sold stock photographs through Getty Images. In 2014, she went back to education to study for a Professional Training Certificate in Equine Behaviour – a topic she wrote about in a monthly column for Countryside magazine from 2014 until 2020. Melissa moved from Scotland to the Mayenne department of France in the autumn of 2019, with her husband and three horses, to start a family and a business in an area that has a deep connection to the horse and rural life of old. LOCAL Breed LOCAL Breeders LOCAL Investment Melissa got acquainted with the French trotting horse in 2010, when she wrote and photographed a feature article on La Chasse à Courre for The Chronicle of the Horse magazine in the USA. She also took part in this event and remembers being impressed with the mentality of these horses and the speed of their trotting gait. When Melissa moved to France in 2019, (to a rural area that is famous for breeding, training and racing trotting horses) she got to know this rustic horse a lot more through her equine photography business and has really fallen in love with its true grit. She now dedicates as much time as she can to documenting the day to day life of these local horses and the horsemen/horsewomen that work with them. SUSTAINABLE Photography SUSTAINABLE Prints Melissa practices sustainable photography. She works locally, prints her photographs on Hahnemühle Hemp paper (in collaboration with a professional Giclée printing service) and uses recycled/reusable materials for displaying, storing and transporting her prints.