A Ruthless Voyeurism

Looking over Frank Rodick’s new series, Faithless Grottoes, I’ve had momentary flashes on Vermeer. A more improbable pairing is hard to imagine, but the work sent me back to Edward Snow on Vermeer. A poet by trade, Snow finds depths—and dark corners—in Vermeer that’s a far cry from Scarlett Johansson and Colin Firth. Snow pays a lot of attention to the space in the paintings. In his consideration of Head of a Young Girl, he describes the black space of the painting as “ruthless”—a word that would aptly describe virtually all of the claustrophobic spaces Rodick’s people inhabit.

And here’s Snow describing the figure of the old madam in The Procuress: “The black in which Vermeer has shrouded her negates any sense of bodily presence and reduces her to nothing more than pure face, a hovering, voyeuristic regard.” Tweak that sentence here and there, and you have an entirely convincing description of what’s going on in the Faithless Grottoes images.

Then look at the reflection in the window of Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window. The ghost image bears an eerie resemblance to one of the heads in Rodick’s Decrement (All flesh / 62 chambers).

Granted, Vermeer’s shrouded, hovering faces live on the outskirts of the imagery—the paintings, with their serene young women at the heart, are exquisitely poised. You have to attend closely to Vermeer to discern the shadows—whereas the Faithless Grottoes photographs have room for nothing but shrouded, hovering figures. Still Snow’s deep reading of the paintings got me thinking—about the space both these artists have created; about where we, the viewers, stand in relation to the scene; about looking, mirrors, reflection (its literal meaning is bending back), voyeurism.

In the Faithless Grottoes pictures, I find myself, again and again, looking—peering—into the scene. But not in a casual way. I feel locked into this exchange, held in place the way that the audience in a darkened movie theater is somehow the victim of the images flickering on the screen. In The Vagrant Coordinates of a Solitary Mind, the woman’s image repeats three times like frames in a filmstrip.

As ambiguous as one of Antonioni’s women (or, indeed, one of Vermeer’s solitaries), she is inscrutable. Like so many beautiful women, she carries within her the knowledge of being watched. But she is nonetheless mute, locked in her own inner world, oblivious to us and to the camera that captures her. And so we become spies, reviewing the surveillance tape for clues to her secrets. We are squarely in the image—but yet not at all.

In the first frame, her beauty seduces us: she’s offering herself up in that first frame, a glamorous sunbather on the Riviera, remote and beautiful. But she softens, both in her expression and in her flesh. In the central frame, the glam girl has melted away, her perfect mask dissolved a little now, until in our last glimpse of her, she has broken up into nothingness, consumed by the encroaching blackness, her face dissolving and her left arm writhing in the agony of death.

Of course, you can also read this image not as a meditation on mortality but rather as a stripping away of the mask. The glamorous, self-possessed persona of the first panel passes through the transitional state depicted in the central image and in the final frame reveals the underlying torment—or emptiness. As in so many of the Faithless Grottoes pictures, the repetitions blast away the notion of a fixed person: it’s all persona, all mask.

Decrement (all flesh / 63 chambers) follows a similar logic. A portrait of a human soul in different manifestations—hunger, insanity, yearning, despair, ferocity, innocence—it uses the rhetorical device of repetition to destablizes everything. As in Vagrant Coordinates, the stuttering of the image certainly serves as evidence of the dissolution of the self—we seem to be witness to a soul very much on the outs with itself—but also does the far more treacherous work of undermining the very idea of a fixed self and of the possibility of our knowing.

Where is she? The center image at the far left, and perhaps the middle image at the bottom, suggest a room to me, perhaps the frame of a door. For some reason, that little nugget makes a big difference to me. Maybe, it’s simply that her being in a room, with a door, means that she’s not allegorical or symbolic. She’s real flesh and that means her suffering and her malevolence take place in real space and real time.

Snow sees the subject in Head of a Young Girl as both turning toward us and turning away: she has turned to look at the painter and then, in the same moment, she begins to turn away from him. For me, the Decrement panels suggest a similar movement. At times, Rodick's woman is appealing to us, looking on us as potential saviors or as prey, depending on which image you home in on. At other times, she is turned away, as though on the other side of an unbridgeable divide, alone in her own, doomed world.

For all her aggression (both the kind that would attack us and the kind that would attach herself to us), she is apart. And unlike Vermeer’s Young Girl, this woman is not captured in an evanescent moment (although in the detail at left, she bears more than a passing resemblance to the reflection in Open Window). Rather, she is trapped in endless suffering, fixed like an ant somehow caught still living in amber and we have “collected” her.

Like virtually all of Vermeer’s work, Faithless Grottoes toys with the question of voyeurism and the ethics of looking. In most of Vermeer, of course, we are pure voyeurs, watchers whose presence goes unacknowledged by the subjects. Head of a Young Girl is the exception, as Snow so eloquently explains. Here, we are seen seeing.

The pair at the beginning of this post—the Young Girl and the Decrement woman—both implicate us. They appeal directly to us and, with that direct gaze, raise the stakes. The question now is not simply what does it mean that we look, that we consume them, but what does it mean that, having had our fill, we look away, that we abandon them to their fate.

The Human Gaze: Part 8

The image of a wild animal becomes the starting-point of a daydream: a point from which the day-dreamer departs with his back turned.
--John Berger, “Why We Look at Animals”

8: Animals Are Us

Last year, my husband and I went to a production of Animal Farm at the Mum Puppettheatre (may it rest in peace) in Philadelphia. I confess: I cried when Boxer died.

Wherever animals may be in our real lives—consigned to the idle lives of pets, or to the margins as zoo animals, or to the horrors of the slaughterhouse and the factory farm—they live in our imagination.

Too powerful to be merely a holdover from childhood, with its accompaniment of animals stuffed, cartooned and/or illustrated, the feelings run deep. Berger is right to link “the reduction of the animal” with our own reduction “to isolated productive and consuming units.” With industrialized capitalism, the world did indeed turn upside down, shaking us loose from our birthplace, our hometown, our connection to the land, our livestock, our father-to-son livelihoods, all but our immediate family—in short, our birthright. We are all exiles now.

What Berger overlooks or undervalues, I’m not sure which, is that, though we are exiles, we are exiles with memory.

And some of us, it would seem, have a better memory than others. I think here of Josef Koudelka and Romania 1968, the straight-out-of-a-fable picture of a Gypsy and his horse in conversation. Or just about all of the work of Finnish photographer Pentti Sammallahti.

Peopled by creatures with interior lives, cares and woes, joys and sorrows all their own, Sammallahti’s photographs of animals show us the way they live when left to their own devices. He photographs the way you imagine Aesop or LaFontaine would have, and each little picture—they’re all fairly small in scale—reads like a fable or an allegory. Being fully autonomous, the animals in these pictures speak to us, and we in turn respond, seeing something of our own lives in theirs.

It’s twilight and, half-submerged in a still pond, a frog—a distinguished professor? an old-time Chicago ward boss?—takes our measure. In the kingdom of the dogs, a Huskie, alert and regal, sits enthroned on a tractor seat and surveys the two supplicant canines at his feet while a third slinks away, muttering revolution. Under a Nepalese tree, a philosopher monkey sits on a rock, contemplating samsara, while in a Moroccan courtyard, the assembly of animals—sheep, goats, cows, donkeys—congregates for a great, if raucous, deliberation. And in a realist’s version of the lamb lying down with the lion, an Indian dog sleeps on the back of a sacred Brahman cow.

Small-scale and unprepossessing, Sammallahti’s pictures seem, at first glance, as humble as the animals they depict. They remind me of magic-realist fiction—a very hard genre to pull off. Too many practitioners of the form fail to ground the magic in the ordinary, leaving the reader struggling with that suspension-of-disbelief thing. But Sammallahti is the most down-to-earth of fabulists, and his animal characters go about their everyday business just as you and I would.

Not all symbolists set out to charm is the way Sammallahti does, trying to build a bridge from our world to the animals’. For many artists, animals are called on to make a point, often, it seems a political one. Certainly George Orwell falls into this camp.

As does Paula Luttringer. Kidnapped and held in one of Argentina’s secret detention centers back in the mid-1970s, Luttringer first began addressing that experience through a series called El Matadero (The Slaughterhouse). Serving as our Virgil, Luttringer plunges us into the world of the slaughterhouse. But in no way does she intend these pictures, with their lifeless carcasses and sulphurous aura, as an indictment of current industry practices but rather as an evocation of a larger brutality.

The Human Gaze: Part 7

The central conceit of the zoo, and in fact the central conceit of the whole culture, is that all of these “others” have been placed here for us, that they do not have any existence independent of us, that the fish in the oceans are waiting there for us to catch them, that the trees in the forest stand ready for us to cut them down, that the animals in the zoo are there for us to be entertained by them.
--Derrick Jensen, Thought to Exist in the Wild

7: The Poor Creature's Cage

When I was in my 20s, I lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Being a bit of a nutter, I used to walk to work, three miles away in midtown. One of my great pleasures each morning was walking through Central Park and visiting the California sea lions in the zoo there. I avoided the other animals—their squalor was just too depressing—but the sea lions! The sea lions seemed free to me.

In retrospect, I see that my notion that the sea lions were free tells you more about my own condition than theirs. After all, in their natural habitat, they chase after fish in the open sea. On land, these most social of creatures live packed together, calling out to one another incessantly, while in the ocean, they form floating “rafts.” They surf the breakers and sometimes jump, like porpoises, out of the water. The experts believe that latter behavior is designed to speed up their swimming—they’ve clocked in at 25 miles an hour and can dive up to 600 feet—but I wonder whether they might also leap for the joy of it. Whatever the case, sea lions take up room, and while Central Park may give them a generous swath of real estate by Manhattan standards, the concrete pool they inhabit is puny by their own.

If you’re thinking about zoos and photography and New York, you think Garry Winogrand. For Winogrand, the zoo was the perfect hunting ground to aim his sights not at the caged animals, but straight at the human ones. Perhaps the most carnivorous photographer ever to stalk the streets, Winogrand couldn’t care less about the plight of the rhinos or the apes. No, with his anarchic spirit, he uses them—uses their very animality—to lay bare our own. He was America’s great court jester, thumbing his nose at us all.

Drawing on the same trope is Robert Doisneau’s The Higher Animals. The people here, joshing and pointing at the poor monkey, hardly make a good showing. As for the monkey, is it too sacrilegious to say that, with all his spiritual serenity and rising-above-it-all, he reminds me of the Dalai Lama? Judging from the title, we can safely assume that Doisneau is making that old argument that humans should be careful to claim too much in the way of superiority over their fellow creatures. But put aside that stale, old chestnut and what you have is a heartbreaking picture of a simian on display.

When I first stumbled on this image years ago, I thought immediately of Vladimir Nabokov’s explanation for the “initial shiver of inspiration” for Lolita: it was, he wrote, “prompted by a newspaper story about an ape in the Jardin des Plantes who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature’s cage.” The story seems apocryphal—no one has been able to track down either drawing or article—but a few years back, a Nabokov fan unearthed a photograph taken by a chimpanzee named Cookie. The picture—which ran in the December 5, 1949, issue of Life magazine just across from a letter sent in by the master himself (clearing up a point of lepidoptery)—is as heartbreaking as Nabokov’s description: the bars of the cage overwhelm the picture and the people staring in at the “poor creature” fade away, mere afterthoughts.

The Human Gaze: Part 9

Happy are those ages when the starry sky is the map of all possible paths—ages whose paths are illuminated by the light of the stars. Everything in such ages is new and yet familiar, full of adventure and yet their own. The world is wide and yet it is like a home, for the fire that burns in the soul is of the same essential nature as the stars; the world and the self, the light and the fire, are sharply distinct, yet they never become permanent strangers to one another…. “Philosophy is really homesickness,” says Novalis: “it is the urge to be at home everywhere.”
--Georg Lukacs

9. The End

At more than one moment in the writing of this piece, I wondered what in mercy’s name was I up to. Animals in photographs? Why not desks? Or coffee cups? Or white blouses?

To make matters worse, I realized one day that, here I was writing about animals, about how we see them and what our seeing reveals about us, and I was struggling to connect up with this elemental world—and what were the tools I was turning to? Those most human of devices—writing and classifying. I needed to pin down my specimens after all.

Nina Katchadourian is on point here. Intrigued by the halfway status of the diorama animals, part real and part artificial, she saw parallels between them and pets. Both had one (figurative) foot in nature and the other (ditto) in the world of culture. But her classic-natural-history-diorama-with-a-twist proved too much for the museum curators and they banished the offending Chloe. Wanting to have their cake and eat it, they did include Katchadourian’s vitrine, now empty, in the exhibition. Talk about a halfway status!

Berger is certainly right that industrialization and capitalism—the whole greedy maw of modernity—ushered in a new age. The farmer scratching his pig’s head is a marginal figure now. Saying this, I mean no disrespect to Verlyn Klingenborg and, in fact, hope for more of his kind. But I’m not holding my breath. Confronted with a hog, most of us now wouldn’t have a clue how to behave: we wouldn’t know how to handle the immediate situation—how to scratch its head, if you will—and we wouldn’t know how to kill it and dress its meat.

It seems to me that most of us live now, at best, under a kind of house arrest: we can look out the windows provided by the panoply of gadgets we’ve devised (televisions, cameras, computers) and see the great wide world out there but we can’t just walk out the front door and wander.
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Still, I think Berger’s not altogether right. I believe that something remains, and it’s that something that has prodded me along in writing this essay, this attempt to understand and perhaps even to reconcile.

I wrote sections of this piece at an artists’ retreat in Virginia. In the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, the animal world is more noisily present than in Center City Philadelphia. Every morning, I awakened to the clatter of birds—mockingbirds, cardinals, catbirds. The bluebirds were hatching when I was there and you’d see their sudden flash of lapis flitting above the meadow. On evening walks, we passed by cows grazing—the center leases out pastureland to one of the local farmers—and on the path from the studios to the residence, is a paddock for two horses: a chestnut and a particularly sociable bay.

One night, as I was passing their paddock on my return to the residence, I heard a rustling in the darkness, the deliberate clopping of hooves. The bay approached, coming up to the fence that separated his turf from mine. We eyed each other. I stroked its muzzle. It snorted a gentle snort. And then the chestnut stirred across the field. My horse turned away from me and made its way back into the darkness.

The Human Gaze: Part 6

Perhaps, these insects are little machines in a deep sleep, but looking at their rigidly armored bodies, their staring eyes and their mute performances, one cannot help at times wondering if there is anyone inside.
--Vincent Dethier, “Microscopic Brains”

6: The Laughing Rat
The day I came back to work after my father died, Natalia, a colleague’s white Shepard, came into my office and laid its head on my lap. That gesture was as touching and as welcomed—as purely comforting—as any condolence note I had received.

Whatever the experts may say, we amateurs know that animals have moods and emotions. Anyone who has so much as spent a weekend in the company of a dog or a cat knows that much. Animals play sometimes and sometimes they mope. They mourn the death of their companions, and they empathize with your grief.

But behavioral science, the orthodoxy for decades in the academy, argues that behavior springs from external rather than internal sources—that is, physical stimuli, not mental states. In this paradigm, the inner life is essentially irrelevant, a grace note rather than the establishing chord. And if its practitioners believed such about the human psyche, well, they saw the animal mind as altogether mute.

The behaviorists did, however, introduce the rigor of scientific method to the study of behavior and, according to Charles Siebert, therein laid the groundwork for their own downfall. Living, as it seems we are, in a second Age of Discovery, we’ve seen the geneticists and molecular and evolutionary biologists, with their research into the biological basis of behavior, transforming the field of behavioral psychology, grounding it in a fuller understanding of the biology behind the behavior.

Writing in a New York Times article, “The Animal Self,” Siebert described studies—all rigorously scientific—that discern the presence of personality in animals: “All sorts of research has been done in recent years revealing various aspects of animal complexity,” he writes, “African gray parrots that can not only count but can also grasp the concept of zero; self-recognition, empathy and the cultural transference of tool use in both chimps and dolphins; individual face-recognition among sheep; courtship songs in mice; laughter in rats.”

The idea that a dolphin or even a sheep might have a personality may not come as such a surprise. But insects? Seibert cites studies that found “behavioral variation” in fruit flies, water striders (we called them skates when I was a kid), and spiders. So we have one particularly belligerent fly that attacks all its fellow drosophila, therein staking claim to a whole banana but striking out with the babes. And water striders whose responses to the arrival of a predator cover a familiar range of reactions—from total obliviousness, to cautious retreat, to run-for-your-life panic. And an individual female spider so aggressive it can’t distinguish between a potential mate and a potential meal.

For artists plumbing the depths of animal personality, video seems to be the medium of choice. Catherine Chalmers, who has chosen the insect world as her great subject, shot her Safari video from a roach-eye point of view. In the opening shot, the star of the piece, an American cockroach, emerges from the misty waters into the dangerous jungle set that Chalmers created in her Manhattan studio (you do have to feel for her neighbors). There, it encounters all manner of adventures, meeting along the way a California king snake, battling rhinoceros beetles, red-spotted newts, and finally—and fatally—a pygmy chameleon. I have to confess to a particular affection for this work: back when I was a kid growing up in suburban New Jersey, I loved to lie face down in the grass, eyeball to eyeball with the bugs. To me, and maybe to the ants as well, it looked like a jungle in there.

Along these same lines, Nina Katchadourian’s video Gift records the battle of wills between artist and spider. It’s an outgrowth of her Mended Spiderweb series, in which Katchadourian searched out broken webs and repaired them with red sewing thread. The animals were less than thrilled. “My repairs were always rejected by the spiders and discarded,” she writes, “usually during the course of the night, even in webs which looked abandoned.”

For her Gift piece, she spelled out the word “GIFT” in little thread letters and then inserted them into the web. But one particular spider was, in the artist’s word, “a real control freak,” who immediately ripped out each letter. In an uncanny echo of E.B. White’s classic animal tale of Charlotte, the spelling spider, Katchadourian’s critter removed each letter in order: G – I – F - T.

The Human Gaze: Part 5

All animals appear like fish seen through the plate glass of an aquarium.
--John Berger, “Why We Look at Animals”

5: A Fine Specimen

When I was a kid—up until sometime in high school, when I transferred my affections to books and albums—I collected shells, birds’ nests, mushroom-spore prints, dog figurines, rocks, Time magazine covers. Mine was an innocent enough impulse—one not uncommon, I imagine, among children, for whom all the world is new. Little did I, or my suffering parents, know that what I was actually engaged in was one of the defining activities of Western culture.

Which is not to say that Europeans invented the behavior. Rather, the collecting impulse runs deep. Many animals—some 70 species—are known to hoard although, being more practical-minded than we, most of them are stockpiling food. Our species, too, seems to be hard-wired for hoarding: researchers at the University of Iowa have recently identified the right mesial of the prefrontal cortex as the neurological source for the behavior.

Suetonius tells us that the Emperor Augustus amassed “statues and pictures [and] … objects which were curious by reason of their age and rarity, like the huge remains of monstrous beasts which had been discovered on the Island of Capri, called giants’ bones or heroes’ weapons.” Among the Chinese elite, a tradition of collecting emerged in the 10th century or so, but here with a focus on cultural artifacts like ancient bronzes, pottery, texts, and paintings.

In the West, it was the Age of Exploration that kicked off a frenzy of collecting, as though the encounter with so much that was unfamiliar overstimulated the right mesial of an entire culture. Whatever the cause, the resulting rage for hodgepodge collecting found expression in the wunderkammern, wonder-rooms, the intellectual great-grandfather of the modern-day museum. These cabinets of curiosities were encyclopedic, housing scientific specimens, cultural artifacts, and artwork under one conceptual roof.

History is only inevitable in hindsight. Nonetheless, it hardly seems coincidental that, confronted with all this stuff—this brand-new, sometimes alarming information about the world—people like Linnaeus began sorting, creating taxonomies, classifying specimens. They needed to make sense of it all.
The modern museum, the direct descendant of all that collecting and classifying, has provided rich fodder for many artists in the last decades: Mark Dion, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Rosamund Purcell, Coco Fusco, who am I forgetting?

My favorite tale from this realm comes from Nina Katchadourian, who was invited in 1994 to make a site-specific piece for the San Diego Museum of Natural History. Katchadourian, who contemplates our face-off with the animal world, was fascinated by the animal dioramas there. She explains: “They seemed so full of paradoxes: the animals were shown ‘in the natural habitat,’ but the viewer always came unnaturally close to them; they were made of their real skins, but at the same time, they seemed dead and artificial.”

Katchadourian wondered whether people ever had their pets taxidermied--in other words, whether there were domestic versions of these dioramas. What better subject for such treatment than the pampered house pet--an animal that already stuck in limbo, with one step in the natural world and the other in the litter box?

Katchadourian tracked down Chloe, a stuffed Papillion lap dog, and arranged to borrow the object from its devoted owner. She researched Chloe's natural habitat and created a diorama with Chloe perched on her peach-colored towel spread over her special pillow, complete with explanatory signage.

The museum balked, refusing the piece on the grounds that it would offend people and upset small children.

“I pointed out that Chloe was genetically very much like the Coyote who lived in a nearby diorama, and that the Coyote didn't seem to upset or confuse anyone too much, but to no avail. The piece was booted out of the show.”

The camera has been every bit as instrumental as the museum in our ongoing effort to pin it all down. Indeed, the photographic archive is brimming with examples of this same need to catalogue, some benign, others not so: Alphonse Bertillon and the mug shot, Eadweard Muybridge and the motion studies, Edward Curtis and the North American Indians, Karl Blossfeldt and the Wundergarten der Natur, August Sander and “Man in the Twentieth Century,” Berenice Abbot and New York City.

Although far less self-assured than in its 19th-century heyday, classifying photographers still labor under the impulse to corral the world and its inhabitants. The best-known contemporary example—the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher—focused on the industrial landscape, but animals get their day as well. Back in 1990, James Balog hit the bookstores with Survivors; an elegant coffee table book of endangered animals posed against a white seamless—like a Richard Avedon production only with animals and without the attitude.

In this genre, monkeys—no surprise here—seem to hold particular fascination. A few years ago, Jill Greenberg inflicted a series of monkey “portraits” on the world, and the world, for reasons far beyond my ken, lapped them up. Ostensibly an effort to capture the range of simian emotion, these souped-up versions of monkeys—Greenberg is a whiz with Photoshop—look like something that came out of Disney by way of the Bachrach Studios, more cartoon than portrait. An unseemly taint clings to them: they remind me of those sad video clips of JonBenet Ramsey, the six-year-old beauty queen dolled up like a 21-year-old sexpot. It’s as though Greenberg thinks the poor apes need a makeover, so they’ll be more palatable to us.

Photography seems in no short supply of simians—notwithstanding the fact that some 25 percent of the world’s primate species are endangered. Mark Kessell’s Unmet Friends series, although including birds, lizards, and fish, skews heavily toward apes and monkeys. Like Greenberg’s, this work takes animal emotion as its organizing principle but, unlike hers, doesn’t condescend to its subject or its audience.

Both photographers, though, share an encyclopedic urge—to “convey the startling range of emotions and personalities,” as the release for Greenberg’s show put it. Even more striking, both propose linkages between the human and animal: for Greenberg, pandering to the crowd, that means showing “how they’re just like us.” Cue the music.

Kessell, with more on his mind, suggests something more subtle: while he has certainly captured facial expressions, he doesn’t ascribe particular meanings to them. What his animals are in fact feeling remains a mystery.

The Human Gaze: Part 4

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.
--Genesis 1:26

4. Working Like a Dog

Even the industrialized countries still have working animals—and I don’t mean William Wegman’s Weimeraners. I’d put money down that, if you don’t count lab animals, most of the workers out there are dogs. Canine job opportunities abound—there are guide dogs, therapy dogs, search and rescue dogs, police dogs, guard dogs, herding dogs—and Fido can always run away to join the circus and be a performing dog if all else fails.

But horses get most of the press. In this country, of course, the horse is iconic, and much of the work on the subject is pure nostalgia—with wistful names to suit. So we have Claude Cambon with A Year on the Ranch: Seasons of Solitude, Adam Jahiel with The Last Cowboy, and the granddaddy of them all, William Albert Allard’s Vanishing Breed. But the bias isn’t limited to Americans: consider Yann Arthus-Berthrand and his cottage industry in photographing farm animals, pets, and now horses.

As proficient as all these photographers may be—and as beautiful as many of their images—the genre suffers from, not to put it kindly, irrelevance. The real truth is that the American cowboy and his horse rode off into the sunset decades ago: according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of people employed in “support activities for animal production”—the category in which cowboys fall—is 10,440 as of May 2007.

Even more rare are the Arabbers, street vendors who used to sell produce from horse-drawn wagons in cities up and down the East Coast. (The name is thought to derive from “street arabs,” 19th-century British slang for street urchins.) Back in the late 1980s, Robin Schwartz documented something of this world, focusing her camera largely on the neighborhood boys who mucked out the stables in exchange for the chance to ride the horses down the mean streets of Baltimore, the only city where the arabbers still ply their trade. Today, only a handful remain even there, and the latest news from that quarter doesn’t bode well for their survival.

The most pertinent example of images of working animals that I know comes from a benighted part of the world where poverty reigns and animals have yet to be entirely supplanted by machinery. Pieter Hugo’s Hyena and Other Men series depicts young Hausa men in the company of their hyenas, monkeys, and pythons. In a throwback to Europe’s dancing bear acts, with a touch of canny cross-marketing thrown in, these itinerant performers stage spectacles with their animals: acting out mock attacks, the men ascribe their power to fight off the fearsome beasts to their herbal medicines—which just happen to be for sale after the show.

Echoing Pollan, Hugo describes the relationship between the men and their animals as “paradoxical ... sometimes doting and affectionate, sometimes brutal and cruel.” Such nuances are beyond the grasp of many Westerners, though. The animal rights community, as Hugo explains, is aghast. But since it’s all on the up and up—the Hausa have permits to keep the animals—intervention won’t be happening any time soon. But Hugo demurs a little: “When I asked Nigerians, ‘How do you feel about the way they treat animals,’ the question confused people. Their responses always involved issues of economic survival…. Europeans invariably only ask about the welfare of the animals but this question misses the point. Instead, perhaps, we could ask why these performers need to catch wild animals to make a living.”

The Westerners also overlook the possibility of affection between the Hausa and their animals. On this particular point, though, the evidence of the photos is ambiguous. The men, performers all, strike poses: proud and elegant, they present themselves as strongmen, warriors. You don’t see any cuddling here, but when a hyena jumps up on a man, as Mainasara does with his handler Abdullahi Mohammed, and the man lets it, trust—and perhaps something like affection—must enter into the relationship somewhere.