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An archive of contemporary artists who explore humans' interactions with animals and nature

Read the author's notes about relevant conferences, exhibitions, opportunities, etc.

Walter Oehrle, "Yellowstone The World’s Greatest Spectacle Opens June 20th" (1933)

Walter Oehrle

Last fall, on my way home from the SPE NW conference in Grand Teton National Park, I stopped to eat in West Yellowstone, Montana. In the bathroom of the restaurant, I saw these charming framed artworks – advertising posters by Union Pacific showing a world full of cartoon bears instead of people. “Nature’s Greatest Exposition: Yellowstone” and “West’s Most Popular Ticket,” they read. They’re creations by Walter Oehrle, a commercial artist who was hired by the Union Pacific Railroad Company to illustrate the cover of a promotional piece announcing the opening of Yellowstone each June. “Beginning with the first brochure, in 1923, the subject was always bears. The four-page, letter-sized leaflet was then folded into a standard business envelope and mailed to travel agents. After the knockout cover, the two inside pages then specified how their clients might reach the park using the Union Pacific gateway at West Yellowstone. The back cover was generally the schedules or more information about other parks” (National Parks Traveler).

What I’ve gathered about Oehrle (pronounced “early”) is that he was born in 1892 in Omaha and he was largely self-taught. He worked for Disney, “for whom he had done cartoons of the mother of Ferdinand the Bull” (source), and he was the creator of the famous mascot and logo of the Borden Milk Company, “Elsie the Cow” (as well as her husband, Elmer, of Elmer’s Glue). He died in 1957.

For a short time, I kept a photo blog called Take Only Pictures; Leave Only Footprints, a collection of photos taken by/of tourists interacting with nature and animals in parks and like places. Looking through archive photos (many from Yellowstone), I was always stunned to see people so close to bears, feeding them from their vehicles and trying to take pictures as close to them as possible. I wanted to write something about these cute, silly cartoon bears acting as representative of the National Park, and park visitors, and Americans in general. How odd it is to look at these illustrations in 2019 – almost 60 years after Union Pacific’s bear campaign ended – when seeing a bear, from a great distance, in Yellowstone is a rarity or a treat. But I fell down a rabbit hole, and instead I just have to recommend this thesis paper by Montana State University student Ellen Rae Kress, “Wonder and Spectacle in the World’s First National Park: Railroad Imagery of Yellowstone National Park.”  (more…)

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Roslyn Julia

Roslyn Julia

For me, the sense of romance that accompanies photography has yet to be lost. Perhaps it’s because I started taking pictures at a young age; my entry into photography was purely about capturing simple scenes and moments happening around me. It makes me think of the line from Lost in Translation, “I tried taking pictures, but they were so mediocre. I guess every girl goes through a photography phase. You know, horses… taking pictures of your feet.”

When I see photography that’s quiet and uncomplicated, pictures that look like they were made with a disposable camera just for the purpose of documenting those little things in the world that feel like magic, I feel so nostalgic. And that’s how I feel looking at Roslyn Julia’s series Exist. The photos, taken over the span of nearly a decade, depict animals, nature, changes in season and place. She writes, “The focus of this work… can be seen as a metaphor depicting the nature of a human soul.”

From the artist’s statement: Nature holds the power to reflect messages or moods back to the viewer, to touch the part of one’s being which it mirrors. Photography holds the power to seize in an instant an energy that is timeless and omnipresent. These images show an invisible line between my own existence and the subjects; two energy fields meeting to become one, even if only for that moment. This is a phenomenon only a camera can make possible. The images turn present to past with the click of a shutter; yet allow the past to live on in the present.

Through the frame of a still image, the capture of pure energy and emotion can become a lasting visual and tangible experience. “Exist” shares seemingly ordinary, daily moments in order to reveal their extraordinary nature. By taking the time to pause an ever moving and changing existence, what is revealed is the eternal, fleeting nature and spirit found in a single moment.

Visit artist site: roslynjulia.com

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Ioanna Sakellaraki

Ioanna Sakellaraki

In regard to my own work right now, one of my goals is to become comfortable being less overt, to accept being more ambiguous for the sake of figuring out what the work means to me. After all, the art we make is ultimately for ourselves. For this reason, I’ve been drawn to photographic projects that contain different types of pictures, mix color and black and white, combine images with diverse lighting scenarios and overall styles. This is how I would describe the work of Ioanna Sakellaraki, especially as I’ve presented it here: selections from Turtles followed by Aidos.

According to Sakellaraki, her work “suggests a constructed space of fantasy and loss within the magical potential of transformation and fiction the camera allows.” Each of Sakellaraki’s photos makes me think about place – places’ identities, what our surroundings say about who we are, how our surroundings inform who we are. In an artist statement for Turtles, Sakellaraki writes, “In the effort to let go of the human obsession for order and rhythm, I led myself adrift in the big wide world.” I love this idea of leading yourself adrift in the process of art making, of experiencing art, of experiencing life. I find the resulting images – and they way they work together – mesmerizing and otherworldly.

Visit artist site: ioannasakellaraki.com

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Kendra Bulgrin

Kendra Bulgrin

“There is a longing to know our selves through animals. Animals make us more human.” I love these lines from Kendra Bulgrin’s artist statement. Kendra, whose work, more broadly, “examines the longing for identity” and questions “how identity is constructed through images, place, memory, decoy, and the miniature,” approached me last summer about an exhibition she was curating. I didn’t know then that she is a wonderful artist herself. I loved getting to learn about Kendra’s paintings when she emailed me a few months ago to submit her work to Muybridge’s Horse.

Kendra very frequently depicts animals in her paintings, and in her new work featured here, hunting decoys. The decoys and their counterparts make me think of scenes from a dollhouse, dolls and and other miniatures. Looking through her work, particularly Wisconsin Home followed by Longing & Belonging, I found myself remembering a favorite book from my childhood for the first time in many years – Pam Conrad’s The Tub People, illustrated by Richard Egielski. I see the whimsy and playfulness, as well as the slightly macabre quality, of the story so clearly in the paintings. Both are haunting and sad, telling about wonder and curiosity paired with aloneness and loss.

From the artist’s statement: I have always been interested in the metaphorical implications of simulation and mimesis. The decoys are life-sized, meant to mimic nature and often used in hunting to lure in or get closer to wild animals. I have been thinking a lot about how humans long to be closer to nature and continually return to it as a place of rejuvenation as we become increasingly detached from the natural world. Yet actual closeness with wild animals is difficult or nearly impossible to achieve except in captivity. I use the decoys as metaphors for my own feelings of detachment from family, nature, memory and my own natural roots and my desire to feel connected. These methods of working with the miniature, decoy, place, and photography allowed me to distance myself, yet at the same time create an idealized nearby place for my longing.

Visit artist site: kendrabulgrin.com

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Yatromanolakis Yorgos

Yorgos Yatromanolakis

Sometimes when I’m first looking at a body of work (it has to be the very first time), I note whatever pops into my head. Sometimes I think that’s better than trying to flesh out and articulate my reaction to the work.

I’ve never seen work like this before. It feels like a children’s story. It feels like clothing, in texture and colors. Fabric-like. I think of glowing, a sheen, metal, paper cutouts, shadow puppets, something animated, another Greek artist, Petros Koublis.

The project is accompanied by a bit of text, included below.

I returned back to the same place. I felt lost.
Within a strange tranquillity, something destructive arose inside me.
I had sunk into a quiet desperation. I denied my past.
I tried a hundred times to erase my memory. I was craving change. Flowing into the night, I became a wild animal.
I confronted nature and death. I wanted to live. Feel every moment. Walk against the whistling wind. Breathe and dive into the cold sea. Harvest moon. Everything caught in the fire.
I walked with her in the blue dusk. Following my heartbeat.
I lapsed into a transformation, an unexpected alignment with the stars.

From the artist’s statement: “The Splitting of the Chrysalis & the Slow Unfolding of the Wings” arose from my unforeseen return to my homeland and my residence there for four years. Isolated in the countryside of the island, Ι was constantly confronted with my traumatic past, my memories and myself. Gradually, through wandering in nature, a conceivable field of action was created within me, an intermediate space full of transformative dynamics, a place of becoming. I surrendered to the fluidity of this space, to a paradoxical and cosmogenic ceremony. I was faced with the most enigmatic aspects of myself; I was searching for a new reality in which I would be able to exist. These photographs are part of a notebook, constructed through this experience, attempting to capture the cycle of an internal process of metamorphosis.

Visit artist site: yatrom.net

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Sebastian Sardi

Sebastian Sardi

Sebastian Sardi began photographing coal mining communities in eastern India in 2008. In viewing his stark, weighty pictures, you can almost feel a layer of dust forming on your skin, smell the smoke and fire as the ground burns. Images and stories of people “digging in the soil with their bare hands” usually makes one think of hard yet meaningful labor, the rewards of working with the land, pride in feeling connected to the resources that keep us alive. But Sardi’s photos make me incredibly sad. The burning of coal to produce energy is a major contributor to global warming, and individuals and communities are harmed as people are forced to relocate as the ground beneath their feet is extracted. Sardi writes about the “fragile balance between nature and mankind,” and photos like these ultimately make me think of nothing but how when we harm our land we are truly an deeply harming ourselves.

Black Diamond will soon be published as a book in collaboration with German publisher Kehrer Verlag.

From the artist’s statement: It is an apocalyptic landscape. There are huge man-made craters everywhere that make up the visible landscape, the ground is burning, and a vast area is oozing with toxic gases, fire and smoke. Amongst all of this, there are people digging in the soil with their bare hands. Coal is mined everywhere in Jharkhand, India, and large parts of it is sorted by hand. The locals call it; “Black Diamond.” Energy produced by the burning of coal is the single biggest contributor to the man-generated carbon dioxide emissions. Coal is a major part in the issue of global warming. Many people have been forced away from these areas when companies and authorities recognized the richness that hides in the ground. Underground fires force people to relocate. The mining companies claim they are unable to put out the fires, while the locals blame the companies for letting the fires burn so the coal can be reached and excavated from underneath their villages. There is a fragile balance between nature and mankind. A sense of discomfort is felt in the slow but seemingly unavoidable struggle towards the collapse of nature. The human inability to break patterns is painstakingly visible in these photographs, as we knowingly keep on extracting the ground beneath our own feet. “Black Diamond” is a close (self-)portrait of the people who work with extracting coal from the ground, as well as an exploration of our dualistic human nature and how one self relates to the outside world while being a part of it.

Visit artist site: sebastiansardi.com

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Darren Clark

Darren Clark

When I met Darren Clark at SPE in September, I learned that he had a collection of dead animal photographs. Normally, while this intrigues me, it does not necessarily mean there’s enough considered material to include in a feature on MH. I often feel like “If it was qualified to be a series, it would have been edited into one.” That’s not how I felt when I saw Darren’s photographs. Instead, I felt like I was on a road trip through the northwestern United States in winter, spotting roadkill animals left and right. I keep thinking about the light in these pictures, how I feel like I know that bright, high-contrast wintertime light, and it looks so much more abrasive in my mind than in these photographs. Here it looks controlled, soft, dare I say pleasant (I really dislike the bright sunlight of the high desert). From these photos, I can tell that Darren both spends a lot of time in nature and has respect and reverence for it, even when it’s gory, gritty, macabre, “brutal.”

From the artist’s statement: I’m primarily a landscape photographer (I guess). I’m also a compulsive bird watcher. These pursuits afford me a lot of time in the natural (whatever that means) world. I usually work on specific projects, but am open to observing and documenting oddities, tragedies, beauty, and other surprising experiences with my surroundings. This selection of photographs is a collections of random tragic encounters from the last few years of living in the high desert of eastern Idaho, the beautiful, brutal, boring, difficult and wonderful place I call home.

Visit artist site: darrenclarkphoto.com

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Luis Castelo

Luis Castelo

When Luis Castelo emailed me some of his photos, I was attracted to their odd colors and lighting and their intense selective focus. I spent quite a while looking at the pictures before I read that this series, Historiae Naturalis, is an example of the artist’s broad use of the “scannography” technique when making interpretations of nature. I don’t know how he does it. I cannot figure out how these images were made with a scanner, but I’m so intrigued.

From the artist’s statement: Our bond with the animal world is evident. In spite of a gradual distancing of this relation during the XX century, we are now witnessing the necessary reunion with our distant relations. We had to wait for the scientism of the XIX century to explain the existence of these animals, which, until then, we had only heard about in myths and legends. The determination of scientists and naturalists of the age to explain the world resulted in a huge representation of animals from distant colonies overseas. Scientific expeditions were at their peak and the search for and classification of both unknown territories and their flora and fauna was highly favoured.

Embalming has a close relationship to photography since both embalm time and life in one instant forever. The attempt to offer a suggestion of life in death by freezing poses or gestures links taxidermy intimately and necessarily to photography. Embalming photography represents naturalized beings in two ways: it leaves death in suspense through the gaze of the subject photographed and offers an everlasting vision of the ephemeral lives of living creatures through the representation of “still lives,” in both cases, after all, vanitas.

Visit artist site: luiscastelo.com

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Joseph O. Holmes

Joseph O. Holmes

Discovering Joseph O. Holmes’s work recently was a wonderful consequence of just wanting to browse some home decor art on 20×200. As soon as I saw those silhouettes against museum dioramas (two of my favorite things), I was hooked. I enjoyed reading about Holmes’s experience making pictures in the style of street photography (one that’s more controlled, slower) inside a museum hall. When the work was still new to me, I remember flipping through LCD on Homes’s website for a while and feeling like the images became less exciting. But when I zoomed out and saw the images as a grid, I realized the effect is there, in these soft, muted rainbow checkerboard fields. The background in each picture is a wash of glowing color or sometimes an abstract blur of lines – rarely an animal that one can just barely decipher. In the project as a whole, I really love how the humans pictured are always nondescript black shapes, and all the color and brightness is in the diorama scenes.

From the artist’s statement for amnh and LCDStreet photography is my passion – a wild mix of technical skill and social engineering, with every component changing and evolving second by second. The original “amnh” series was shot over a period of six weeks in New York’s American Museum of Natural History, and spun my love of street photography into a radically different environment, a sort of off-the-street photography. The project carried me from sunlight into museum darkness, from rapid-fire to a zen-like slow motion, and forced me to rethink the whole process of stalking strangers. These images strip the components of traditional street photo down to the barest cues: silhouettes gazing out over vast, artificial veldts and jungles.

To create the images for the “LCD” series, I photographed visitors at New York’s American Museum of Natural History over a period of four months in 2008 and 2009. I based all choices about focus, white balance, color, contrast, etc. solely on the LCD screen that is captured in each image; the rest of the image was allowed to fall where it may. Other than those adjustments, the images are unaltered.

Visit artist site: josephholmes.io

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Sheng Wen Lo

Sheng Wen Lo

There’s a Peter Marlow photo that I love, “A bear sits alone in a pit in Kaliningrad zoo,” taken in Russia. The moment when I saw Sheng Wen Lo’s series White Bear, I thought of this image. It’s curious how pictures like these have the power to incite intense emotions in the viewer, when generally people do not seem to be upset experiencing what’s depicted firsthand.

When I reached out to Sheng, he sent me a comprehensive press kit, and I pored over every file inside. Reading his thoughts and writings about his work was fascinating, and I feel that many of his ideas will affect the way I think about animals and the making of my own photography. There’s so much that I want to share. In the spirit of treating this space as a collection of the artwork I love, and compiling all the information I can find about it, I’ll break the format I traditionally use and begin with Sheng’s artist statement.

From the artist’s statement: “White Bear” depicts polar bears on display and their artificial habitats globally; the project attempts to engage with dilemmas concerning captive animal programs. It has been executed in 26 sites across Europe and China.

“White Bear” is not about polar bears — it studies the visible symptoms amid animals on display and their artificial habitats by focusing on one specific species. These habitats are designed to satisfy both the spectators (audience) and the dwellers (animals). With their effort to mimic the arctic environment, the uncanny structures combined “nature,” “home” and “stage.” Juxtaposed with man-made backgrounds, the enclosures and their furry protagonists formed visions decorated with contrasting elements — grasslands, plateaus, swimming pools, car tires, fake seals, stone stairs, painted icebergs, yachts, airplanes, and even skyscrapers. Under limited space and resources, there are various issues lurking beneath their surfaces.

As natural habitats are being destroyed, it may be reasonable to keep certain species in controlled environments; however, it remains questionable whether some results reflect their causes. The existence of captive white bears portrays this ambiguity. Promoted as exotic tourist-magnets (mega fauna), the bears stand at the singularity points at which the institutions’ contemporary justifications fall into question — the mission of conservation, research and education seem challenged by the interest of entertainment.

Sheng does not subscribe to the belief that “all captive animal programs are evil” or “zoos should not exist,” because, as he states, “animal issues are complex and intertwined with each other.” In an interview about his work, I read that Sheng wishes to avoid anthropomorphism, that he “would not like to make pictures of ‘sad looking’ animals.” He says, “That is not very scientific.”

“I would like to propose another way of looking at animal issues,” Sheng says. “Because when facing these issues, it is very easy to get emotional and let our preconceptions dominate our judgements. In a lot of cases I would argue that is not what [is] best for the animals in the end. There may be a lot of benefits to discuss things scientifically, and make a balance when making judgements.”

While White Bear focuses on polar bears, the project is more broad, using photographs of one species to explore “captive wild animals on display, the dilemma between its intension and cost.” Sheng says, “It is not about whether animals are suitable for captive programs, but rather about whether some animals are not the ideal species to be kept in captivity. Therefore, [I] focused on one particular species, which I believed stand at the crux of this dilemma. In other words, while some animals may benefit from captive programs and serve conservation, education and research purposes, there are species that seems naturally unsuited for artificial habitats.”

Finally, of their man-made habitats, Sheng asks, “I understand it is difficult to use a real iceberg but what is the point of [not] just paint[ing] one instead? Rationally, these bears are born in captivity, so they have probably never seen a real iceberg or a sea lion. I wonder who are the users of these visual objects, and whether the enclosures are homes or stages?”

At first I was attracted to these really beautiful photos that at the same time made me laugh and broke my heart. After spending the better part of a day reading the artist’s words about the work, I feel like I have an entirely new set of considerations to make when photographing animals and when visiting and thinking about zoos. I’m so grateful to know about this work.

Visit artist site: shengwenlo.com

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