Why Look at Animals?

I confess that I like to take photos of animals. These images were strongly influenced by two essays I read in the last year: “Why Look at Animals” written in 1974 by John Berger, and “Lancelot” by Elena Passarello (2016). Berger’s essay is about humans’ loss of the time when “animals constituted the first circle of what surrounded man”. Berger talks about the gaze between man and animal, and what he surmises each see and experience in that exchange. He suggests that consumerism and the industrial revolution have altered this relationship to the point where we really don’t even see animals anymore, and that something vital to our species has been lost. Passarello’s essay is about her own childhood fostering a “warped” view of animals: she was surrounded by images, advertisements, toys, and fabric prints depicting animals, but when taken to a zoo as a child she barely noticed the actual animals housed there for all of the other entertainment offered to make up for the marginalized and somewhat lackluster “real” animals. For me, these images are about what we see and feel when we look at the animals that are near us nowadays, fake animals and real, dead and alive, and how we feel about and imagine that gaze being returned. This is a relatively new project for me and it is very much “in progress" (not done!). I decided to submit it here because I have found the reviews/insights provided by you very helpful in the past! Thanks for looking.