Namaste, 2009 by Anne Berry

Contender Anne Berry was trained both in photography and horse science, so it seems only natural that her camera find its place in the animal world. In her series Menagerie she creates concentrated portraits of monkeys, bears, rhinos, baboons and myriad other creatures, each with the seriousness and focus of someone who has utmost respect for animals and their emotions. In her images, Berry largely de-contextualizes her animals from their environments. The viewer doesn't know if they are in a zoo or in the wild, stuffed animals imbued with life through the craft of the camera, or living animals frozen in time. Berry seems intent on having her subjects transcend their context and writes of her images,

Today people wander through urban environments disconnected from nature, dreams, and myth. Animals, because they exist both literally and in the universally understood world of metaphor and dream, form a bridge between the visible material realm and an essential reality that is not easily seen or understood.

Animals have been subjects of photography from as long as the medium has existed. Starting in 1878, Edward Muybridge carried out a series of photographic experiments, creating a set of images that deconstructed the movements of a horse. He subsequently captured dogs, monkeys, deers, and then humans, using the camera and its capacity to freeze time as his tool for analyzing form and motion.

I am also reminded of a series of diorama images in the American Museum of Natural History's Picturing the Museum collection, which documents exhibits and the preparation of exhibits back to the early 1900s. Though the backdrops to animal dioramas are largely manufactured and the animals stuffed and preserved, they are captured and presented as though in their natural habitats. Through clever staging at the hands of the museum and clever framing on the part of the photographer, it is easy to imagine that the animals are in the wild, as vital as ever.

White Heron or American Egret habitat Group from South Carolina, 1928 by H.S. Rice & Irving Dutcherfrom the collection of the American Museum of Natural History

On 20x200 this week we featured Blue-and-yellow Macaw_044 by Andrew Zuckerman, an artist who adopts digital technologies to capture rare and tropical birds. This photographic process enables the bird to appear in a "hyper-real Edenic state," as Sara Distin wrote in the newsletter, highlighting the equisite palette of the bird's coat, isolated from its natural habitat.

All of these photographers' work points out that our eyes are drawn to animals for innumerable reasons: they fascinate us, they elicit great emotion, they are beautiful to look at, they can have spiritual important, and they connect us with the natural world even when removed from it. Anne explicates on her own many reasons for photographing animals, which she documents on her blog.