Robin Schwartz might have created a whole new genre of photography: the interspecies family portrait. Pairing her daughter, Amelia, with a variety of animals–gibbon apes, dogs, kangaroos, llamas–Schwartz produces images that are both familiar and fantastical. In one image, a sleepy-eyed Amelia cuddles with a hairless cat on a white bedspread. In another, she clings to a clothed monkey the way a sister hugs a brother. “The photographs are not documents,” Schwartz says. “They are evidence of an invented world and the fables we enact in that world.” It is a world in which “the line between human and animal overlaps or is blurred.”
Schwartz began photographing her daughter with animals when Amelia was three years old, beginning with a chimpanzee. Now, ten years later, Amelia is equal parts subject and collaborator. She contributes ideas about what to wear, how to pose, and how to interact with the animals; from foxes to primates, Ameliaʼs list of potential animal participants is always expanding. None of it would be possible, Schwartz says, if not for Ameliaʼs patience and her preternatural ease in the presence of animals.
Born in New Jersey 1957, Schwartzʼs work has been included in over fifty books and has appeared in The New York Times, O Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, Interview Magazine, and more. Her third monograph, Ameliaʼs World, was published by The Aperture Foundation. Her photographs are held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, New York and San Francisco, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Brooklyn Museum of Art, among other institutions. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Photography at William Paterson University of New Jersey.
EXHIBITION
Amelia’s world
June 1-29, 2012
Warm Springs Gallery
Charlottesville, VA
USA
