American photographer Emmet Gowin (b. 1941) is best known for his portraits of his wife, Edith, and their family, as well as for his images documenting the impact of human activity upon landscapes around the world. For the past fifteen years, he has been engaged in an equally profound project on a different scale, capturing the exquisite beauty of more than one thousand species of nocturnal moths in Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, French Guiana, and Panama.
These stunning color portraits present the insects—many of which may never have been photographed as living specimens before, and some of which may not be seen again—arrayed in typologies of twenty-five per sheet. The moths are photographed alive, in natural positions and postures, and set against a variety of backgrounds taken from the natural world and images from art history.
Throughout Gowin’s distinguished career, his work has addressed urgent concerns. The arresting images of Mariposas Nocturnas extend this reach, as Gowin fosters awareness for a part of nature that is generally left unobserved and calls for a greater awareness of the biodiversity and value of the tropics as a universally shared natural treasure. An essay by Gowin provides a fascinating personal history of his work with biologists and introduces both the photographic and philosophical processes behind this extraordinary project.
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- Mariposas Nocturnas: Moths of Central and South America, A Study in Beauty and Diversity
- Emmet Gowin
- Princeton University Press
- 2017
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- In Almost Every Picture #3
- Erik Kessels
- KesselsKramer
- 2004
Self-portraits of wildlife taken by a hidden camera with motion detector.
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- In Almost Every Picture #5
- Erik Kessels
- KesselsKramer
- 2006
A family capturing the beauty of their photogenic dog.
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- In Almost Every Picture #9
- Erik Kessels
- KesselsKramer
- 2010
A family struggling with one of the biggest mysteries in photography: How to shoot my black dog?
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- Useful Photography #005
- Erik Kessels
- KesselsKramer
- 2005
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- Nina
- Erik van der Weijde
- 4478ZINE
- 2016
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- Nocturnal Ecologies
- Felix Wilson
- Perimeter Editions
- 2019
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- A Sensitive Education
- Francesca Todde
- Départ Pour l’Image
- 2020
With A Sensitive Education the photographer Francesca Todde explores, through the figure of bird educator Tristan Plot, the possibilities of empathy between different natural species.
The narrative, far from being a naturalist documentation, is rather focused on the emotional sphere and sensitivity of birds and humans. The photographic research develops in resonance with the delicacy of this wordless dialogue.→more -
- The Animals
- Garry Winogrand
- The Museum of Modern Art
- 1969
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- L'Intérieur de la nuit
- George Shiras
- Editions Xavier Barral
- 2015
A keen observer of the animal world and a pioneer of wildlife photography, George Shiras was also the first, at the turn of the 20th century, to reveal the nocturnal lives of forest animals through surprising flash photographs. From mobile shots on his canoe to photographic tricks he developed (when the animal triggers itself the shot by running into a thread), he was able to capture deers, lynx, porcupines, and various birds.
This monographic premiere in an intimist format presents a selection of these photographs, enhanced by a poetic essay by philosopher and writer Jean-Christophe Bailly.
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- Good Boy 0372
- Giovanna Silva
- Motto Books
- 2016
Sudan, the only remaining male northern white rhinoceros.
Ol Pejeta Conservancy, Kenya.
This project documents Sudan, the last white rhinoceros of North Africa. Sudan lived his life inside the Prague zoo, before being transferred to Kenya for reproduction and specie preservation. Sudan lives under armed protection. Giovanna Silva spent ten days in his wildlife preserve, following him from a close distance. The book, entitled Good Boy – the way the guards call the rhinoceros, this lullaby which endlessly accompanied Giovanna’s days with the rhino – 0372, his breeding number, is a tribute to this prehistoric and unique animal. The book is conceived as a sequence of abstract images, in which the animal is barely recognizable, and close-up of his skin and his body progressively fading away.→more -
- Des oiseaux
- Graciela Iturbide
- Editions Xavier Barral
- 2019
A major figure of Latin-American photography, Graciela Iturbide’s approach combines the documentary and the lyrical. Off-center compositions, graphic effects, and heavy shadows create a poetic universe where a feeling of strangeness is combined with one of harsh reality. The powerful equilibrium of her compositions produces skies filled with birds, comical, unexpected situations where chickens are pictured sitting wisely on market stalls, while elsewhere chirping flocks appear to invade the scene in agile, flowing movements. For Iturbide, living birds represent freedom. But death is never far away in her work, nor indeed is a certain sense of the surreal.
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- Murder
- Guillaume Simoneau
- MACK
- 2019
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- Horse
- Heleen Peeters
- The Eriksay Connection
- 2020
The human and the horse share a long history together. At first horses were working animals, serving as a means of transport in agriculture and in war. Nowadays, horses are domestic pets with a moral status: used for recreation, in competitions, and for medical therapy.
In 1948 the grandfather of Heleen Peeters (BE) began a business in what many now consider to be taboo: horse meat. At that time, people were poor, recovering from the struggles of World War II, and horse meat, being a high quality product for an affordable price, was in high demand. But now, 70 years later, the consumption and production of horse meat is disappearing.
Peeters broadly documented and investigated horse (meat) culture in Belgium, France, Italy, Poland, Argentina, Uruguay, Kyrgyzstan, the United States and Canada. Why is horse meat becoming less popular? What happens to horses if they are no longer eaten? How do we relate to animals in the first place? And what about the need to cut back on our meat consumption?
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- The Chosen Ones
- Hendrik Zeitler
- Journal Photobooks
- 2016
”There is nothing so expressive as the eyes of animals—especially apes—which seem objectively to mourn that they are not human.”
Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory19 portraits, taken between 2002 and 2015 in Sweden, with an afterword, In the eyes of the Other, by Camilla Flodin.
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