Untitled, 2009 by Janelle E. Jones

The midnight black crows that create domestic catastrophe in contender Janelle Jones' images seem to have no regard for keeping a clean house. They rip apart the contents of the pantry, shred roll after roll of toilet paper, pull apart feathered pillows, and in their anthropomorphic state, embody a house as though misbehaving children.

Jones creates her cacophonies with intention, with the birds devilishly still lingering at the scenes of their crime. Unlike other photographers who either explore the invitation of the wild beast into the unadulterated home as in Amy Stein's Domesticated or glorify the animal-as-human as in Jill Greenberg's large-scale posed Monkey Portraits, Jones portrays the birds as the obviously guilty, but shameless invaders who seem completely unaware they are treading unusual territory.

She writes of her work,

Humor, in its various forms and degrees, also plays an important role in my thought and creative processes. My work often suggests an air of irony and absurdity, and pushes the viewer to question first the truthfulness and then the apparent meaning of the image. By pushing situations to the point of absurdity, I am able to reduce overwhelming ideas to physical situations that are visible and understandable.

The crow, known to be both an intelligent and ominous avian, is the star of the Aesop's fable, The Crow and the Pitcher wherein the bird finds a pitcher full of water, but cannot drink it because its beak is too short. Rather than giving up, the crow drops pebbles into the pitcher one by one, until the water level is high enough for it to drink the water. Whether Jones views her carefully articulated gaggle of mess-making crows as intelligent, plotting creatures, or as a foreboding presence, she captures them with her tongue-in-cheek.

See more from this series and others on Janelle's website.