Chicago-based photographer Elliot Ross has spent several years photographing animals from around the world. He discarded their surroundings afterwards to make these isolated, powerful and haunting portraits. Here he speaks about the genesis of his work.
I had never lived with an animal companion until I was in my mid-fifties. Then I moved in with the woman I had just married and her small white cat named Sadie, who was thirteen years old at the time. One week, when my wife was out of town, I took care of Sadie on my own, and I called my wife to say of my new animal companion, “I have fallen in love.” Over time, I would come to understand the complications of that statement.
Sadie died at the age of twenty-three after a long illness. My wife hung up an old snapshot of the cat, and I kept gazing at it, filled with grief, but also with a sudden and unexpected sense of wonder. How could I, a human being, have formed such a strong emotional bond with an individual of another species? How could Sadie and I, so different from one another, share this state of being called life? And how could I, as a visual artist, explore those feelings that seemed to have such powerful existential implications?
I felt drawn to make photographs of other animals (as I prefer to call them, since we as humans are also animals). So I took my camera to the parks and streets of San Francisco, and then wherever my travels have taken me in the years since, to parts of the US and Europe, to photograph wild and captive animals of every species I could encounter. I photographed primates, fish and birds and rabbits and turtles; not only what are normally considered wild animals but also the species that live wild among us, the pigeons and the squirrels, as well as our domesticated animal companions and farm animals.
My exploration began more than twelve years ago. Over this time Schilt Publishing released two books of these images, titled Animal and Other Animals, respectively. Alan Klotz Gallery in New York and Schilt Publishing Gallery in Amsterdam, among other venues, mounted exhibitions and began to represent my work. Now I’m working on a third, related project I call Animal Studies in which, among other things, I capture animal movement. (Emerson: Nature ever flows, stands never still) Several of these images were recently published in the Animalia issue of Granta, Britain’s leading literary journal.
All this time my sense of wonder has never ceased to grow – tempered by the dread of what humans can do to cause the extinction of all life. I turned to the writings of naturalists, philosophers, biologists. The readings fascinated me. Yet neither the wisdom of great thinkers nor the images I created could ever solve my original questions: about my emotional bond with Sadie, about the mysteries of sharing “life” with other species.
Elliot Ross
Elliot Ross was born in Chicago. His work is represented in New York by Alan Klotz Gallery, in Amsterdam by Schilt Publishing Gallery.
