urban animals

We are face-to-face,
in the company of significant others,
companion species to one another.

Donna J. Haraway

Animals in Art - Michel Vanden Eeckhoudt

Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent.
To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden,
where doing nothing was not boring - it was peace.

Milan Kundera



© Michel Vanden Eeckhoudt, Naked Dog, Belgium, 1993

Black & White - Beautiful Decay

Where beauty has no ebb, decay no flood,
But joy is wisdom, time an endless song.

William Butler Yeats



Keith Carter, Hummingbirds, 1989
(more Keith Carter)

Warning:
This post contains photographs of dead people and/or animals which some viewers may find disturbing

Animals in Art - Martin Usborne

the difference in mind between man and the higher animals,
great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind

Darwin


Buzz, from the series The Silence of Dogs in Cars

Animals in Art - Yamamoto Masao

I photograph to capture existing phenomena.
Thinking about this day by day, the mountain ceases to be a mountain,
the cloud is no cloud, things left behind are not left behind. . .
maybe I begin to see what only I can see.

Yamamoto Masao



#1315, 2005

Black & White - Dogs

When the Man waked up he said,
'What is Wild Dog doing here?'
And the Woman said,
'His name is not Wild Dog any more,
but the First Friend,
because he will be our friend
for always and always and always.'

Rudyard Kipling



Elliott Erwitt,  New York City, 2000

Movie Moments - Jean Painlevé

Roll on, deep and dark blue ocean, roll.
Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain.
Man marks the earth with ruin,
but his control stops with the shore.

Lord Byron


watch the videos below

Animation Short - When The Day Breaks

watch the video below

Japanese animal masks

Children in the industrialized world are surrounded by animal
imagery: toys, cartoons, pictures, ...

... decorations of every sort. No other source of imagery can begin to compete with that of animals. The apparently spontaneous interest that children have in animals might lead one to suppose that this has always been the case…. Yet it was not until the nineteenth century that reproductions of animals became a regular part of the décor of middle class childhoods
John Berger, Why Look at Animals, 1980

Animals in Art - Doug Aitken

watch the video below

Black & White - Horses

The New York that I had come back to was not my old New York. I used to wander around the streets disconsolately, until one night during a blizzard, I happened to see a man watering a couple of steaming horse-car horses, and I thought, “Well, there at any rate is the human touch.” That made me feel much better.

Alfred Stieglitz



Alfred Stieglitz, “The Terminal, New York” (1892)

Snake-Calligraphy

No sooner had the Snake beheld this reverend figure, than the King began to speak, and asked: "Whence comest thou?" "From the chasms where the gold dwells," said the Snake. "What is grander than gold?" inquired the King. "Light," replied the Snake. "What is more refreshing than light?" said he. "Speech," answered she.

Britta Jaschinski - Zoo

We need animals. Animals don't need us, but we need them.
We constantly look for any kind of connection we can possibly get to them.

Britta Jaschinski

The very deep and the very small

I cannot think of the deep sea without shuddering at the nameless things ...

... that may at this very moment be crawling and floundering on its slimy bed, worshipping their ancient stone idols and carving their own detestable likenesses on submarine obelisks of water-soaked granite. I dream of a day when they may rise above the billows to drag down in their reeking talons the remnants of puny, war-exhausted mankind —of a day when the land shall sink, and the dark ocean floor shall ascend amidst universal pandemonium.

H.P. Lovecraft