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Regarding New Animals: Photographs
by Allison Hunter
What makes an animal new?
Most of the animals we see in Allison Hunter’s photographs (the
Simply Stunning series)
recall the violence of Gods and men and evoke images of silent suffering
and muted death. A sheep (Untitled
1, Untitled 4)
appears as both the figure of the innocent soul and of its slaughter;
a horse (Untitled 7)
connotes a history of docility and faithful service to men, whereas a
deer reminds us of an animal transfixed by the headlights of a car and
killed on the road. Most of the animals we see in these photographs are
therefore kind of human, trapped in an anthropocentric vision of ours,
so much so that we cannot even think of them without thinking about this
or that ethical or religious value. These are the animals we think we
know, old animals, imprisoned in the consciousness of man.
The radical gesture of Hunter’s pictures is the way she turns the
moment of “taking” a photograph into an act of freeing, since
her pictures release animals from their suffering contexts. Hunter does
not take photographs of the animals we see; instead, she takes an already
photographed animal out of its photographed context (the circus environment,
for example), and then relocates it on the surface of a non-identifiable
space. It is as if the symbolic emancipation of animals here required
an actual intervention upon another photograph, or as if in order to see
new animals, photography itself had to change so that it no longer “takes”
an image but gives it back to what is photographed. So freed animals are
let be in an environment about which we cannot say much, as environment
that refutes our efforts to understand it on the basis of familiar concepts.
Not even the basic dichotomy between background and foreground quite works
here. The background is not behind and doesn’t evoke anything human;
it can hardly be called a landscape for it is not even certain that these
animals are placed on the earth; in some instances (Untitled 1,5)
they seem to be floating as if to refute the force of gravitation. The
pinkish whiteness that produces the problematic background of some of
the photographs (Untitled 1,2,3,4) resembles sand, a desert in
formation (Untitled 2,4), or dense, cloudy air (Untitled
1,3), as if signaling that animals are making a new union with the
elements in order to create a new world.
A giraffe (Untitled 5)
appears out of a sheer intensity of color that does not construct a coordinated
space that would enable the beholder to find his bearings. Such darkness
marks a collapse of the anthropocentric symbolic, pointing to a space
in which a human finds itself at a loss to read it. The giraffe may be
advancing toward the spectator but the spectator doesn’t know anything
about the world it is coming from because such a world is utterly new
and unknown to him.
The seal (Untitled 6)
jumps out of darkness into a circle of lighted water. But the light here
comes from within the darkness without suggesting any other source of
light other than itself. The light appears so that the seal, and not the
observer, can see. The horse (Untitled
7), the only animal that bears a trace of its connection with
man (a saddle), is ready to cross a sharp edge between light and darkness
that is not night, for it is denser and blacker than the nights we know
or imagine. It is not a darkness humans share with horses but a new intensity
humans will have to learn how to inhabit.
Because the backgrounds don’t depict a structured space, it can
hardly be said that animals form a foreground; they don’t seem fixed
or rooted which is why the space of Hunter’s photographs is closer
to the ruses of two-dimensional fresco painting than to the tradition
of three-dimensional perspectival seeing. In fact, animals are dislocated
from the center of the photograph so as to frustrate the desire of our
gaze to find a center and position itself within it. In addition to the
absence of center, the size of the photographs – 30 x 50 inches
– forces the gaze of the spectator to float, without ever being
able to see the whole. Our desire to appropriate the seen is disturbed
by the fact that the photographs are “untitled.” Language
here collaborates with the visual in its effort to emancipate animals
from the horrifying power of our naming and identifying.
The animals’ gazes don’t intersect with ours. Sometimes we
see its back (Untitled 3,6,7,10), sometimes its gaze is far above
us and the animal doesn’t see us (Untitled
5), whereas at other times (Untitled 4,9) we can see its face
but its gaze passes us by. The animals are neither expecting us nor fearing
us for they don’t see us; rather they are indifferent to us. The
spectator sees animals that no longer accompany him. They do see and react
to something but what attracts them comes from the photograph itself.
They are thus absorbed in their own world and the spectator realizes that
if they, the animals, seem distant – without triggering an emotion
in us – it is because the photographs eradicate the presence of
the human observer: nothing points to the observer or asks for him, everything
remains dedicated to the animals themselves. In beholding these photographs
the spectator thus bears witness to his own absence. The radicalism of
these photographs is in the power by which they force the observer to
start searching for something other than himself. Once seen without the
shadow of human habitation, and emancipated from the apprehending power
of human naming, animals will appear different and for the first time
a modest man will understand himself as the one who accompanies them.
That will be new.
Branka Arsic, SUNY-Albany
