Elliot Ross – Other Animals

Dates: April 3 – April 24, 2012
Location: United Photo Industries HQ | 111 Front Street, Suite 204

Our household cat of many years died in 2006 when she was quite old, and my subsequent feelings of loss led me to ask myself these questions: How is it possible that I, a human being, can share the quality called “life” with another animal that is so different from me? How is it that I both identified with her and experienced a powerful feeling of her otherness? Contemplating these perhaps unanswerable questions led me to observe and photograph a variety of animals- other than humans.

In 2010, Schilt Publishing of Amsterdam published my book Animal, which contains the first fifty images from the resulting project. However, there are about two million known species of animals on earth, so, not yet feeling a sense of completion, I continue the exploration. Roughly half the exhibition at UPI is comprised of a selection of images from the book. The other half contains images made since the book’s publication.

I have also read widely – from Darwin to Derrida – of other people’s thoughts on the human relationship to other animals. And while I can’t say my images have always been “informed” by these writings, I’ve chosen to exhibit a few quotes from texts that I’ve found to be thought provoking and, I believe, complementary to the images. In the following quote, the American philosopher Cora Diamond sums up the kind of perplexity that led me to begin this project in the first place:

In the case of our relationship with animals [there is] a sense of astonishment and incomprehension that there should be beings so like us, so unlike us, so astonishingly capable of being companions of ours and so unfathomably distant.

How powerfully strange it is that they and we should share as much as we do, and also not share; that they should be capable of incomparable beauty and delicacy and terrible ferocity; that some among them should be so mind-bogglingly weird or repulsive in their forms or in their lives.

Elliot Ross was born in Chicago. He received a Master of Fine Arts degree from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1971. His work has been exhibited internationally and is in collections in the United States and abroad, including those of the Bibliothéque nationale de France, Paris; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Musée de la Photographie, Charleroi, Belgium. His project Animal was featured in fotoMAGAZIN (Germany) in 2008 as part of its “Meisterwerke der Fotografie” series and was a nominee for a New York Photo Award in 2009. The book Animal (ISBN: 978 90 5330 730 4) was published by Schilt Publishing, Amsterdam, in 2010. He is currently working on his ever-expanding portfolio of animal images, as well as a series of large photographs with the working title The Trees. He lives in San Francisco and New York.