Being trapped in a crowded city with hundreds of people, I feel at ease every time I go to the zoo and watch the animals. The Bronx Zoo is the closest zoo from where I live, but does take one and a half hours by subway, which is not a short trip to take in New York City life. Going to the zoo is a mini vacation for me, and it allows me to escape the city life and enter a whole another world. I have no interactions with other people so I end up not saying a word for the whole day, which is an unusual yet a serene experience for me.
When I arrive at zoo and climb up the hill, I always see the giraffe first. I don’t take pictures of the giraffes right away. Instead, I just observe them, which in itself makes me happy. I constantly see children screaming with excitements and most adults just taking a few pictures with a camera or smartphone instead of supervising their children and then they walk away. Every time I see that, I get upset, almost angry. Is there no respect at all for those animals trapped in a fence living in restricted space at the zoo? I become empathic towards these animals because the people in the city has also forgotten to respect each other.
Taking pictures is my profession and a means of expression for me, but I felt guilty about putting the camera on the animals and could not easily press the shutter. I felt as though I was once again trapping them in a frame when they are already trapped at the zoo. So I decided that I would not lock animals in a frame like the others, and instead I wanted them to be free and not confined in my photos. This was the motivation to start the current project, “breathe into the zoo”, which was my first time shooting animals.
In order to proceed with this project, I worked with a pinhole camera that could not delete the image as soon as I didn’t like it, which is opposite to a digital camera where it is easy to capture and delete. It takes about 40 to 90 seconds which is much longer compared to a digital camera that can take photos faster than blink of an eye, and constantly moving animals made it very difficult to aim the pinhole camera. So it wasn’t easy to capture their whole movements in which the animal enjoys the sunlight, snacks on the plants, or takes a short stroll. Sometimes, I would not get a single animal from a few rolls of film I used that day. Because of the nature of the pinhole camera, only a long-lived subject remains in the picture, so among the many giraffes, the giraffe who stayed in one place for a while would be in the picture while the other giraffes who stayed around for a shorter period would appear blur like ghosts. I did not want to capture the instant scene I want, but just stay there and quietly watch their journey. I did not want to be a photographer, but instead I wanted to be an observer.
Focusing the animals with the camera viewfinder sometimes feel similar to hunters aiming at the animal, and trapping the animals in the frame may be like imprisoning those animals already trapped in a space. It seems that my work is almost contradictory since I do wish that those animals are free. However, I do have a sincere heart for those animals and I want my project to bring life to the animals in my photographs like the way God created the human by blowing life into the soil.
