Over the past 30 years, Zana Briski has traveled alone to remote corners of the world to photograph the animal kingdom in all its splendors. Being at one with fauna was a relationship she sought from a young age. While society demands performance ritualized gestures and acts, Briski felt more aligned with the raw purity of the natural world.
“Animals know who they are. There is no pretense,” she says. “They are connected in the true sense. When I am with an animal in the wild, boundaries dissolve.”
Somewhere along the way, Briski realized that working with a camera introduced a third object to the equation that created a sense of distance she needed to overcome. In order to get closer, she would have to abandon the control it offered and tap into the deeper frequencies of the creatures themselves.
On a 2016 trip to Borneo, Briski set the camera aside to make photograms of live insects. “When the images were revealed in the darkroom back in New York, they were beautiful, immediate and profound,” she says. “I could feel the presence of the insect on the paper and I was captivated.”
Over the past eight years, Briski has gone off the trail, forging her own path to create Animalograms, a new exhibition of collection of one-of-a-kind, life size photograms of bears, tarantulas, coatimundi, and skunks, and other wild creatures under the quiet cover of night.
