benhästen
I am a photographer.
I like lurchers.
horseofbone.com
maudkristina at gmail dot com
Photo by Jim from Sweet Juniper
“I often take the dog for hikes in the woods on Belle Isle. Inside of him a wild hunter sits dormant, and it is necessary to occasionally make him feel useful. Earlier this year a pack of wild dogs were harassing us, keeping their distance. They were smaller dogs than the ones that attacked us at the playground years ago, and once we started chasing them they led us right into the abandoned zoo. Inside the zoo, we followed their tracks through a maze of fences and walls. I could see that everything remained much as it had been left. The felid cages still had trees nailed to the walls for the scratching of giant claws. The monkey house sat silent, still smelling slightly of its occupation.
The dog loved the smells of the old zoo, rooting around every corner of the cages or the big cat enclosure. He was the Teddy Roosevelt of German Shorthaired Pointers, the Hemingway of birddogs: a big game hunter, sniffing at ghosts.
It was strange to stand inside the enclosures and look up to where countless people would have watched whatever animal dwelt there. Even stranger were the plants growing inside each enclosure, non-native species probably chosen carefully long ago to resemble the flora of wherever the animal was from but not to tempt them into nibbling. Even a simulacrum of wildness, abandoned, will become truly wild given enough time.
Every building and every enclosure chokes with overgrown plants in the summer. Dead trees have fallen to crush the boardwalk in places. The buildings are mostly intact, filled with snake and spider exhibits, educational displays. Scrapping damage seems light, though I do think the copper is gone. Signs inside the once-heated felid cages still warn KEEPER IN THE YARD.
From their earliest days, we teach our children about wild things. Even as more and more of them grow up in cities or suburbs, seemingly isolated from anything truly wild, we tell them stories and read them books about elephants and bears, monkeys and tigers. When you’re a kid, almost all the good books are about these wild things, most anthropomorphized and friendly. To those of us reading these stories, this obsession with the wild might seem pointless or silly. But to a kid these pages are an introduction to our world and its amazing capacity for strangeness and beauty. We take our kids to the zoo - even ignore the unnerving vacant glaze in the eyes of penned polar bears - because we know there is nothing quite so magical to those tiny minds as seeing what was fiction become suddenly so real.
But in time, of course, every child will see a zoo for what it is: a place where nothing is real, a place where wild animals cannot be wild, where every instinct is curbed by confinement or scheduled feedings.
This place will never be a zoo again. It is home to a pack of wild dogs now. A reclusive badger or two. Red foxes and red squirrels. A bluejay and a cardinal. A mile away, the fallow deer sit in their million-dollar home, but within the zoo I still find a broad-tined antler shed by a buck during his temporary stay. Half buried in the ground, it is already starting to rot.
We take our kids to the zoo and think we’re teaching them about wildness, but really we’re teaching them about dominion. A lesson in the power of fences. While all the time, along our highways, outside our very windows, wild things are there. Waiting.”
Via Where The Wild Things Aren’t
Return to the Abandoned Zoo
Found thanks to Wings and Fins’ post on Feral Houses
McCall’s Magazine, Kids in Linen Closet
Photo by Nickolas Muray
Color print, assembly (Carbro) process, ca 1941
Via George Eastman House Collection
Self portrait
“There is this weird… it is weird that my two friends died and two days later I should have died but I didn’t. That is what made me become interested in art more as something more than a means to pick up chicks and party the way that I did in college.
It took me years to cope with stuff.
When I was still an undergrad I started dabbling with self portraits. When I got into graduate school things were conceptually more intense. I was still dealing with all of this crap that happened to me and why I survived and my friends didn’t. I started working purely with self portraits and I would assume these different historical or fictional characters based on other artists’ self portraits. From the Dutch painting era of the fifteen hundreds on up but they all dealt with mortality. They are all talking about the self as artist, as the creator and your own mortality.”
“‘the historical process, wet plate collodion, is not a happy cheery one’ according to Jody, which, he explains, emerged from the ‘industrial age and was used to document death and post mortem babies. It was the last visual record of people going off to war. The history of photography is imbedded in the dark history of America and the civil war….the bloodiest….’”
Via Judy Sigunick
(photographer unknown)
Photo taken during the First World War
Harefield, England
“An Australian nurse at No 1 Australian Auxiliary Hospital about to feed their pet kangaroo Jimony.”
Via Australian War Memorial Collection
Portrait of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, c.1870 (British Library)
Photo by Lady Alice Mary Kerr
“Women photographers feature in the collection but only as a minority. This absence, in itself, says a great deal about the way women have been (and often still are) ‘hidden’ and under represented in what remains a largely male, Western art canon. That said, new material is still being discovered and Lady Alice Mary Kerr’s, Portrait of Wilfred Blunt, c 1870, see opening photograph, is one such gem.
‘Alice Kerr’s photographs are largely unknown apart from the rare examples in the British Library collections, but her intense and compelling portraits – particularly this study of the poet Wilfred Scawen Blunt – merit comparison with the work of Julia Margaret Cameron.’ (From the press release)”
Via Miranda Gavin’s Hotblog - Points of View: Capturing the 19th century in Photographs – but from whose point of view and why?
“John Falconer, the library’s head of visual materials (…) hoped the exhibition would interest younger people ‘whose experience of photography is now purely digital, where there is simply an ignorance of the nature of positive and negative photography’.”
Via the Guardian
Points of View: Capturing the 19th century in photographs
British Library, London
Fri 30 Oct 2009 - Sun 7 Mar 2010
Seahorse - Hippocampus erectus
from Animalia
Photo by Henry Horenstein
“…all this work is expressly low-fi; Horenstein works mostly by himself, at zoos and aquariums. He does this intentionally; he notes that if he went to an aquarium with three assistants, ‘they’d pull me aside in a second’. Horenstein uses 35mm film cameras with macro lenses and Scala (he has a bunch stock-piled in his refrigerator). I questioned Horenstein about his technique and he says he’s developed a ‘variety of really obscure little methods just for this. I like the no big-deal aspect of it; there’s no decisive moment - they’re always going to be swimming around that tank. It’s just a matter of patience.’”
Via Shoot the Blog
