Last week I talked a little bit about how abstraction had crept into my architectural photography. But that's not the first place I started moving in an abstract direction. That was in zoo photography.
In large part the Minnesota Zoo was where I learned to photograph. It's about ten minutes from my house, and memberships are inexpensive, so when I was figuring out what I was doing I spent a lot of time there. (I still spend a lot of time there.)
I've always been very aware of the fact that our perceptions of animals are largely based around their silhouettes, and somewhat uncomfortable with it. When you're at the zoo a lot, there are only so many full-body photos you can take before you start repeating yourself the vast majority of the time. So I moved out of the silhouette mode fairly quickly, and into focusing on details, which led me into semi-abstraction.
These photos are still about animals, but they're also about shape and texture in ways that most animal photography isn't. They're less about being iconic and more about showing you something you may not have noticed before.
As a zoo photographer, I spend more time with the animals than most people. Sometimes I even spend longer periods of time with the animals than their keepers do, because each keeper is responsible for many species and I have the freedom to spend an hour or more watching a single animal. This allows me to develop a more-intimate perspective, and hopefully show you something that may not have been available to you because you were trying to see everything, or working at the pace of your four-year-old.
For a long time I was taking a lot of pictures of feet. We're not used to thinking about feet most of the time; we don't see people's feet very often, and we think about them even less. Which is good: people's feet aren't very interesting, at least to me. But we extend that attitude toward animal feet, which are far more diverse and spectacular.
Grizzly Bears are pretty iconic. You probably have a lot of images in your head of them, you probably know more than a few things about them. But I'm guessing you never thought about their toenails until you saw the picture on the right, here. Why would you?
The animal kingdom is full of little details like that, and my mission as a zoo photographer is to bring them to you, so you can learn about them without necessarily having to learn the skill of seeing them for yourself, or spend hundreds of hours at a zoo looking for them.
Reticulated Giraffe neck, 2013
Giraffes aren't a wholly silhouette-dependent animal. Even in illustrations they don't really look right without their reticulated patterns. But within that, there are details of how the pattern is expressed on any particular giraffe, and hair textures, and subtleties of muscle structure and color that reward a much closer examination.
Birds also gain interesting qualities when viewed from a different perspective. Details of feathers and feather-patterns are extremely interesting, and I'm fascinated by the process of preening, which I caught this flamingo doing.
As you can see there's a wide range in how abstract I choose to go with these photos, and at the same time I'm still taking a lot of more-traditional animal portraiture. There are other series that I'm maybe spending more of my time and mental energy on these days, including Jellyfish which is sort of the next stage of abstracted animal photography. But I still keep coming back and adding to this series when I get the chance. I'll leave you with some photos from a trip I took to the Audubon Zoo in New Orleans in early 2017.
