Animal Farm at the Getty: Stay, Sit, Pose!

Animals in Photographs, by Arpad Kovacs (Getty Publications, 111 pp., $24.95)

As an artistic medium, photography got cooking in the 1830s, but it wasn’t until 1870 that someone snapped a decent shot of a live animal in nature. Prior to that, because long exposures were required, an animal needed to be dead or comatose before you could make it stand or lie still. However, you could cheat, as John Dillwyn Llewelyn did in 1856 with a heron standing in a pond, by using a taxidermied specimen.

Cameras have evolved from the few to the many, from the complex to the automatic, and how the photographic eye portrays animals has advanced right along with them. Early on, the subjects were largely farm animals, lots of horses too since horses doubled as every means of transportation, as well as the bounty of a successful hunt (deer, rabbits, fowl) and a smattering of beloved pets.

As the 20th century kicked into high gear animals were considered fair game for social commentary and aesthetic statements above and beyond what nature had intended. In the 1980s, the Chinese-born Japanese photographer Hiro posed animals with costly jewelry; and whereas Frederick Sommer, in 1939, photographed the messy detached head and neck of a skinned chicken, in 2003 Pinar Yolaçan went a little further (the times permitting it) and created a collar from two raw chicken heads that encircle the neck of a weary-looking older woman.

There’s a bit more surreal humor on view here with Sandy Skoglund’s “Revenge of the Goldfish” (1981) and Tim Hawkinson’s “Octopus” (2006), but most of the other images are no laughing matter as rather befits what a serious institution would collect for posterity.

Animals in Photographs, after all, is the ninth volume in a series that highlights images related to a single theme or subject–windows, trees, nudes, etc.–and then considers how our attitudes to  these subjects have changed in front of and behind the camera.

Although photographs can be artfully manipulated, we tend to read them as documents, even before we stop to consider the possible bias behind the work or whether their message could be tempered or negated by additional photographs.

Along this line, some photographs of animals speak louder to our sensibilities than others: It’s hard not to react when viewing the decapitated head of a rhinoceros placed with her dead calf, taken by an anonymous photographer in 1863, and one may react similarly when viewing the trio of rifled buffaloes (Native Americans of another sort pushed to the brink of extinction) taken in 1882 by Laton Alton Huffman.

More recently, there’s Taryn Simon’s 2006 photograph of a physically malformed and mentally retarded white tiger, the result of selective inbreeding. One hardly needs to say that today we are more responsive to the feelings of animals, to the point of passing laws to help guarantee their well-being, even as we escort so many other creatures out the door and into extinction.

Arpad Kovacs has provided a short, succinct introduction that presents these observations and concerns and then steps back for us to peruse and ponder any larger questions for ourselves.

We see which animals have been selected and framed over the years, and might want to reflect on their appearance in art before photography, back to the jackals and cats in Egyptian art as well as monkeys in 18th and 19th century French art, and how, in some ways, they’re the predecessors of the Aflac goose and the Geico gecko. Maybe that’s a relatively new phenomenon as well, using animals to sell services and merchandise, although in Kovacs’ book there is a headshot of a German shepherd in a 1950ish storefront window (taken by August Sander between 1925 and 1930) that’s offering hats for sale. On the other hand, Berenice Abbott’s photo (c.1936) of a large rooster-shaped sign that says “Poultry” makes more sense and presumably this kind of visual imagery that shows what’s being sold goes back a very long ways.

When people have their portraits taken they want to look their best, but only a handful of the animals here truly look elegant or dignified. One daguerreotype of a dog sitting up on a table, taken around 1854, shows an alert and attentive animal. Albert Renger-Patzsch’s baboon from about 1928 looks proud, even regal, but perhaps the most dignified creature here is the wild South African dog that graces the book’s cover, taken by Daniel Naudé on February 25, 2010.

If animals could photograph humans, how would they have us stand, sit, lie down, or run?

The range of images covers the history of the medium. It’s kind of ironic that the only “cute” cat photo here is by–of all people–Robert Mapplethorpe (“Kitten, Naples,” 1983). Everyone will have their favorites, of course, and mine might be William A. Garnett’s “Snow Geese with Reflections of the Sun over Buena Vista Lake, California” (1953) and Alex Harris’ “Las Trampas, New Mexico” (1984, printed 1993), although Taryn Simon’s malformed tiger, mentioned above, is hard to pass by or not to return to. The animal looks directly at the camera/viewer, perhaps to question or perhaps to accuse. In this sense, he speaks for all of the animals in the book and in the exhibition.

In Focus: Animalia is on display through Oct. 18 at the J. Paul Getty Museum in the Getty Center, 1200 Getty Center Drive, Los Angeles. Hours, Tuesday through Friday and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., and Saturday from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Free; parking $15 per car. Call (310) 440-7300 or go to getty.edu. ER

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