BOOK REVIEW: ANIMALIA - photographs

photographs seeing animals in a new way

ANIMALIA - photographs by Henry Horenstein. Pond Press, Brooklyn, NY; www.pondpress.com; info@pondpress.com. 2008. 90 Pages. $40.00 hardcover, 9-1/2" x 12-1/2", ISBN 978-0-9761955-2-8. photographs.

Horenstein takes photographs of animals, but he is not a naturalist. The photographs were taken in zoos and aquariums. While one might think this would give them a certain "staged" quality or limitation, an artificiality or familiarity as photographs, this is not the case--far from it. The photographs were exhibited (through June 2008) at the Harvard Museum of Natural History as a part of its "lessons in looking" project. This project aimed at being provocative and "chang[ing] the frame" of viewers' experiences with nature photography; as the Museum's Director Elisabeth Werby explains in her Foreword. Horenstein's 64 duotone photographs of animals--actually mostly parts of animals--patently work toward this end.

This skilled, imaginative, idiosyncratic photographer focuses sharply on a specific part, or a detail, of an animal. Such sharp focus--as in some photographs by Edward Weston, for example--leaves the subject so that the viewer does not easily recognize it. Horenstein does not go this far, however. His aim is not to demonstrate the power of the camera to microscopically hone in on a subject in such a way that one cannot recognize it; but rather to enlarge the viewer's awareness of and connection with his subjects of animals. The photographs are a kind of synecdoche. The parts of an animal Horenstein focuses on are usually ones the viewer associates with it from seeing many ordinary photographs or films of it or from school classes in the world of nature. The viewer knows an octopus from a tentacle lined with suction cups; an Emperor penguin from its elongated white belly; a dolphin from its sleek, bulbous shape.

Horenstein is patient, too. Since "you can't tell an elephant where to stand [or] ask a skate to smile...you must be very patient and wait" for the opportunity to take a good picture, he tells in his Photographer's Note. But there's more than simply waiting for the right moment. The photographer achieves his extraordinary effects by using macro lenses and by working with grainy, black-and-white film, then developing it in sepia to give it "an old school, timeless feel." It works: The combination of photographs which are at once familiar and challenging and technicalities of film and development used make a unique, lingering impression. It is unlikely most viewers will see the animals in Horenstein's photographs ever again without seeing them or thinking about them in some respect as they were led to see and consider them with these photographs.