In his essay ‘Why Look at Animals’, English art critic, novelist, painter and poet John Berger argues that ‘everywhere animals offered explanations, or more precisely, lent their name or character to a quality, which like all qualities, was, in essence, mysterious’ (Berger, p. 254, 1977). It can be argued that animals are regarded as mysterious to man, all the while, they are familiar in other ways; after all, Berger describes in his essay that ‘animals constituted the first circle that surrounded man’ (Berger, p.3, 1977). This observation is a representation of the distance and familiarity felt between man and animal and the contradictory ways in which both reside in the same physical space with one another; yet in an array of physical and non-physical characteristics, animals are set apart by their visible difference to humans; in their ‘superficial anatomy…in their habits, in their time, in their physical capacities, they differ from man’ (Berger, p. 4, 1977). Yet, they are ‘born, are sentient and are mortal,’. The familiarity, Berger argues, comes down to look, to the moment man and animal are locked in gaze; ‘by no other species except man will the animal’s look be recognized as familiar…’ For this reason, Berger concludes, ‘when he is being seen by the animal, he is being seen as his surroundings are seen by him’. His recognition of this is what makes the look of the animal familiar’. The animal however, ‘scrutinizes him across a narrow abyss of non-comprehension’ (Berger, p.5, 1977). In addition, it can be argued that while these visible distinctions allowed for a distance between man and animal, this perceived sense of mystery is also a result of education and socialization which has enforced these beliefs (INSERT QUOTE FROM LOUV). As a result of these imposed ideologies of ‘separateness’ and ‘mystery’, the animal is commodified and domesticated with ease and the desire to replicate the look shared between man and animal is provided by introduced forms of captivity and commodity. These concepts will be discussed alongside examples of contemporary photographic artworks by Hiroshi Sugimoto, Diane Fox, and Amy Stein, which attempt to grapple with and make sense of these contradictions. In addition to discussion and analyses of these contemporary works, the writings and philosophies of Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida will help to define the characteristics and the differences between ‘man’ and ‘animal’ in order to add context, understanding, and support the analysis of the contemporary photographs.
First and foremost, in order to analyze and understand the mysterious essence and divide between man and animal, the two must be clearly defined. In this paragraph, this topic will be discussed alongside the philosophies and writings of Martin Heidegger, and Jacques Derrida. In order to identify the divide between human and animal, the key differences must be outlined. For German philosopher and seminal thinker, Martin Heidegger, the key difference between man and animal lies in a very specific term: Dasein. Originally a German vernacular term for ‘existence’, it is derived from da-sein, which literally means ‘being-there/there-being’, as described by author Joseph Childers in The Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism (Childers, p. 70, 1995). For Heidegger however, this was an inaccurate definition (Dreyfus, 1990). Instead, he viewed the term to associate more closely with ‘Being’, that very sense that makes a human, so very human, that to face Dasein, was to face ‘one's individuality, one's own limited life-span, one's own being. Heidegger thus intended the concept of Dasein to provide a stepping stone in the questioning of what it means to ‘be’—to have ‘one's own being, one's own death, one's own truth’ (Collins, Selena, p.81, 1998). As displayed by Heidegger’s interpretation and definition of Dasein, there is a key element in one’s awareness of death. This is a very specific ‘human’ distinction. In Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida, author Matthew Calarco deconstructs and examines the question of the animal in the ‘context of contemporary Continental philosophy…’ highlighting Heidegger’s standpoint, but also stating that ‘Heidegger’s work contains a number of important (albeit contentious) reflections on the nature of animal life and the status of the human – animal distinction’ (Calarco, p.16, 2008). Noting these limitations, Calarco helps to draw the connection between Dasein and its relation to its key signifier of difference between man and animal, explaining that Heidegger’s views on the death of Dasein’s being a ‘demise’, that there is a finitude to it that reaches beyond death. Calarco describes that, ‘inasmuch as Dasein has a relation to death as such and death in terms of its own finitude, it never simply perishes or comes to an end’ (Calarco, p.17, 2008). However, in the case of animals, ‘(as instances of the kind of beings that merely have life but have no relation to finitude) never properly die or demise; they can only perish’ (Calarco, p. 17, 2008). French philosopher Jacques Derrida confirms this in his book, Aporias: Dying — Awaiting (one another at) the “limits of truth”: ‘Heidegger never stopped modulating this affirmation according to which the mortal is whoever experiences death as such, as death. Since he links this possibility of the “as such” (as well as the possibility of death as such) to the possibility of speech, he thereby concludes that the animal, the living thing as such, is not properly a mortal: the animal does not relate to death as such. The animal can come to an end, that is, perish, it always ends up kicking the bucket. But it can never properly die’ (Derrida, p. 35, 1993). In conclusion, the two key characteristics that ultimately set man and animal apart, are the differences in the way they experience life and death, and in the human’s capability of speech that the animal does not possess.
While there are still characteristics of mystery in the eyes of man when it comes to the animal, a great deal of that mystery simply feels impossible to attain; speech can not be shared and the encounter has been whittled down to something outside of its original organic setting: Berger writes, ‘During the 20th century…Cities, growing at an ever increasing rate, transformed the surrounding countryside into suburbs where field animals, wild or domesticated, became rare. Such while life as remains is increasingly confined to national parks and game reserves. (Berger, p. 13, 1977). This change, while resulting in increased separation, gave rise to many attempts to understand the original locked gaze shared between man and animal, to reproduce this sensation of understanding or connection endlessly. We attempt to bridge this gap between man and animal by two key specific means; placing animals in captivity and under the eyes of constant observation, and the reproduction of the animal in capitalist and consumerist terms. In ‘Why Look at Animals’, John Berger details this cultural and physical marginalization of the animal, highlighting that the ‘animal of the mind’, depicted in sayings, dreams, games, stories, and language itself, ‘have been co-opted into other categories so that the category animal has lost its central importance’. The ultimate result, is that they have been co-opted into two very specific marginalized categories: ‘the family and the spectacle’ (Berger, p. 15, 1977). The family and the spectacle are quite evidently intertwined in the zoo and diorama experience. Man’s attempts, and failure to create a drawbridge between himself and the nature and intimacy of sharing the ‘look’ Berger describes, with an animal is well depicted by Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto’s series ‘Dioramas’, in which Sugimoto explores the reality, and the mysterious surreal nature of stuffed animal displays at the Natural History Museum in New York City; ‘Eventually I visited the Natural History Museum, where I made a curious discovery: the stuffed animals positioned before painted backdrops looked utterly fake, yet by taking a quick peek with one eye closed, all perspective vanished, and suddenly they looked very real. I'd found a way to see the world as a camera does. However fake the subject, once photographed,’ he described, ‘it's as good as real’ (2016). In his photo Alaskan Brown Bear, 1980, (see fig 3), the viewer feels immersed in the scene, as if the photograph is of a real-life scene, rather than a set of long-dead stuffed brown bears. The sense of reality is so uncanny that upon realizing its fiction, the viewer suddenly takes note of the flatness of the painted mural; that something is not quite right, there is no life at all. Taken from their ecosystems killed, stuffed like a child’s toy, and placed in the sterilized and surreal confines of a glass box, the diorama is practically a testament to man’s contradictory relationship with animal; his insatiable desire to capitalize on whatever the animal can provide to him, and his underlying tenderness for preserving the bodies of creatures he will never fully understand or come to know. As Sugimoto described in the introduction to his photo book, Dioramas, ‘the only thing absent is life itself. Time comes to a halt and never-ending stillness reigns’ (Sugimoto, 1999). Sugimoto’s attempts to create a reality within the confines of an attempt to understand that which Berger considers to be the ‘mysterious’, is a testament to the distance felt between the eyes of a man and his observations of animal, very akin to what Berger would describe upon man looking at the animal, that animal does not reserve a ‘special look for man…but by no other species except man will the animal’s look be recognized as familiar. Other animals are held by look. Man becomes aware of himself returning the look’ (Berger, p.5, 1977). Not only is Sugimoto’s series an example of man’s endless attempt to create a sense of understanding between himself and the all-encompassing nature of the animal through layers of visual interpretation and reproduction, it is evidence of his failures to do so. The zoo itself, is an endless array of evidence of those same failures, as Berger describes: ‘The zoo cannot but disappoint. The public purpose of zoos is to offer visitors the opportunity of looking at animals. Yet nowhere in a zoo can a stranger encounter the look of an animal. At the most, the animal’s gaze flickers and passes on. They look sideways. They look blindly beyond…They have been immunized to encounter, because nothing can any more occupy a central place in their attention’ (Berger, p. 28, 1977). As a result of this captivity, the organic encounter shared between man and animal is gone, because an animal locked in a cage is no longer truly the animal it was, wild and untamed.
Beyond highlighting the failures of captivity to draw man and his gaze closer to animal, Sugimoto’s photographs tie into the way animals are reproduced and sold in a consumerist society; the animals in these glass dioramas may once have been breathing and may be considered ‘real’, but they so closely resemble the glassy- eyed and softened nature of a stuffed animal children’s toy. The history of animal toys isn’t so far from these stuffed taxidermy animals sitting in glass dioramas after all; the ‘first stuffed animals were produced, and the most expensive were covered with real animals skin — usually the skin of stillborn calves. The Same period saw the appearance of soft animals…such as children take to bed with them. Thus the manufacture of realistic animal toys coincides, more of less, with the establishment of public zoos’ (Berger, p. 23, 1977). To conclude, Sugimoto’s photographs are a key example of the failures of man to grasp the reality of his observation and shared gaze with animal, and points to a rather sinister undertone in the visual reproduction of animals in consumerist terms, in this case, children’s toys. The examples of contemporary artists attempting to grapple with these contradictions are seemingly endless; Diane Fox, photographer and Senior Lecturer in the College of Architecture and Design at the University of Tennessee produced a photo series called UnNatural Histories, presenting the same contradictions and ironies that present themselves in a zoo scenario and challenges them; as Fox describes, these images are ‘a collection of photographs shot in natural history museums in the US and abroad. Using reflection and the inclusion of items within the diorama’s case meant to remain unseen, I seek to point to its unreality and the disconnection within the human/animal relationship. It is this dichotomy between the real and the unreal, the version of life portrayed and the actuality of death, the inherent beauty of the animals within their fabricated environment and the understanding of its invention, which finds me both attracted and repelled’ (2016). In one of her photographs, Animals Reflecting, California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco, California 2010, (see fig 1), this dichotomy is especially evident; a stuffed gorilla gazes glassily through the case, which carries the reflections of several other glass dioramas and passerby’s. The gorilla’s expression, however fabricated still feels incredibly intimate in some way, and yet the walls covered in a painted facade and fake plants remind the viewer of it’s fictive reality. The lighting is fluorescent, and feels unnatural in it’s falsified environment.
Another contemporary set of images by photographer Amy Stein, Domesticated: Modern Dioramas of Our New Natural History, is illustrative of this conflicting tie and separation between man and animal; in its Harvard Museum of Natural History press release it was described as a collection of images exploring ‘the tenuous relationship between humans and animals as human civilization increasingly encroaches upon nature’ (Harvard Museum of Natural History, 2009). Informed by actual newspaper accounts and oral histories from residents of the small town of Matamoras in northeastern Pennsylvania, ‘Stein’s photographs are staged scenes, often using taxidermy animals, illustrating real-life encounters between humans and animals. Stein’s images, at the same time both surreal and paradoxical, explore the increasingly permeable boundary between the human/built environment and the wild’ (Harvard Museum of Natural History, 2009). Stein writes, ‘We at once seek connection with the mystery and freedom of the natural world, yet we continually strive to tame the wild around us and compulsively control the wild within our own nature’ (Stein, 2016). While Stein’s work carries many similarities to that of Hiroshi Sugimoto and Diane Fox, her work differs in the way that physicality plays a huge role in her images. In order to illustrate the distance and barriers felt, and created, between man and animal, Fox utilizes literal and physical barriers that occur in modern day environments. Stein’s images are laden with examples of these barriers, intentionally placed in the scene to communicate ‘the primal issues of comfort and fear, dependence and determination, submission and dominance that play out in the physical and psychological encounters between man and the natural world’ (Stein, 2016). This strong separation between a man made environment and the ‘wild’ is tactical in each individual image; in one of them, ‘a girl and huge bear stare at each other from opposite sides of a fence surrounding the family pool’ (Stein, 2016), (see fig 2). The girl, surrounded by a concrete and metal enclosed environment, stands long, seemingly frozen with fear, but continues to look with a certain curiosity. She is usually separated and protected in her metal- fenced environment, but it brings the viewer to question, who is being fenced in, who is being protected from what? While Sugimoto and Fox’s images capture the gaze from camera to diorama, Stein takes the view outwards, almost displaying the look shared between man and animal in crystallized, frozen form.
In conclusion, the mystery experienced and felt by man in regards to his disconnect to animal, has been so palpable and hard to materialize, that man has attempted to do just that, to capture it, to reproduce it, to draw closer to it in order to understand or to feel some sort of sense of spectacle. The work of Hiroshi Sugimoto and Diane Fox attempt to grapple with this, to make what is not real, real again, all the while, to acknowledge the reality of its fiction — this fiction that is the diorama and the animal on display. Meanwhile, photographer Amy Stein takes these contradictions a step further, going outside of the museum and the zoo, and into the man made ‘natural’ environment. The frames are recreated from reality, yet the taxidermy animals and real small town scenery brings her visual enquiries to life. These means are especially evident in the creation and the experience of the zoo, which fails to meet these desires for spectacle and connection. As John Berger describes in Why Look at Animals, ‘however you look at these animals, even if the animal is up against the bars, less than a foot from you, looking outwards in the public direction, you are looking at something that has been rendered absolutely marginal; and all the concentration you can muster will never be enough to centralize it…within limits,’ Berger concludes, ‘the animals are free, but both they themselves, and their spectators, presume on their close confinement’ (Berger, p. 24, 1977). In summation, Sugimoto, Fox, and Stien all present visual attempts of the need to grapple with the contractions placed by the captivation of animals and capitalization on their perceived mystery, and man’s failure to truly get any closer at all.
To conclude, Berger’s argument that 'Everywhere animals offered explanations, or more precisely, lent their name or character to a quality, which like all qualities, was, in essence, mysterious’, is true. What began as an attempt to replicate and understand the encounter man shared with animal, ended up becoming a series of attempts surrounding captivity and commodity that failed to grapple with this sense of mystery. The philosophies of Jacques Derrida and Martin Heidegger assisted in confirming that the key differentiations between man and animal lie in death, and speech; that humans have an awareness of their ‘being’, that dominates the way they relate to others and the world, and their eventual ‘demise’. The animal, however sentient and mortal, according to Derrida and Heidegger, can only perish. Berger brought to light that this attempt to draw closer to the encounter with the animal, which all began with the look shared between man and animal, led to attempts to understand and recreate the experience to the point that it was lost; ‘therein lies the ultimate consequence of their marginalization. That look between animal and man…has been extinguished. Looking at each animal, the unaccompanied zoo visitor is alone. As for the crowds, they belong to a species which has been isolated’ (Berger, p. 28, 1977). Contemporary art attempts to grapple with this contradiction and supports Berger’s statement; Hiroshi Sugimoto attempts to make what is far gone and fictive, feel deeply real and present again. In addition to Sugimoto, Amy Stein takes physicality and staging into her images to display the dichotomy between man’s built environment and his relations with the animal within and the animal in his environment. In Diane Fox’s images, she pulls out the falsities and the acknowledges the disconnect between a glass diorama, a stuffed animal, and the ironies that present themselves. Above all, these works point to the failures to reach any further understanding of the mystery seen in the animal by man.