Amy Stein
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Humans are awful. We’re ruining the world. And though we’re killing most of them off, animals will one day reclaim what we’ve taken from them. This is what Amy Stein’s tragic and haunting photo series Domesticated seems to express.
4 comments
Lil Thursday 21 February 2008
I just want confirmation if the top picture of the wailing wolf (?)/ coyote (?) is real? it looks like a carefully made, intricate, diorama…..makes my spine tingle…
Ai Thursday 21 February 2008
This is what it said on her website:
My photographs serve as modern dioramas of our new natural history. Within these scenes I explore our paradoxical relationship with the “wild” and how our conflicting impulses continue to evolve and alter the behavior of both humans and animals. We at once seek connection with the mystery and freedom of the natural world, yet we continually strive to tame the wild around us and compulsively control the wild within our own nature. Within my work I examine the primal issues of comfort and fear, dependence and determination, submission and dominance that play out in the physical and psychological encounters between man and the natural world. Increasingly, these encounters take place within the artificial ecotones we have constructed that act as both passage and barrier between domestic space and the wild.
The photographs in this series are constructed based on real stories from local newspapers and oral histories of intentional and random interactions between humans and animals. The narratives are set in and around Matamoras, a small town in Northeast Pennsylvania that borders a state forest
Gary Thursday 21 February 2008
I think it’s real… The rather minimalistic background makes the subject really pops out.
dR Friday 22 February 2008
I think that the wailing wolf is “stuffed” (taxidermy)…
Quotes from Amy on the topic:
“My photographs serve as modern dioramas of our new natural history. Within these scenes I explore our paradoxical relationship with the “wild” and how our conflicting impulses continue to evolve and alter the behavior of both humans and animals. We at once seek connection with the mystery and freedom of the natural world, yet we continually strive to tame the wild around us and compulsively control the wild within our own nature. Within my work I examine the primal issues of comfort and fear, dependence and determination, submission and dominance that play out in the physical and psychological encounters between man and the natural world. Increasingly, these encounters take place within the artificial ecotones we have constructed that act as both passage and barrier between domestic space and the wild.”
“The photographs in this series are constructed based on real stories from local newspapers and oral histories of intentional and random interactions between humans and animals. The narratives are set in and around Matamoras, a small town in Northeast Pennsylvania that borders a state forest.”
“Domesticated is a series of staged photos in the tradition of Jeff Wall, Gregory Crewdson and Philip-Lorca diCorcia. The work is not a documentary project nor is it wildlife photography. The work uses a mix of living and dead animals. I was inspired by the dioramas you see at natural history museums that show the drama of early man living in close quarters with the wild around him. I imagined a new series of narratives that would serve as the modern equivalent of that tension. The photos are recreations of real stories of human/animal interactions that took place in the transitional space between domestic habitat and wild habitat. They are set in a small town in Pennsylvania that borders a state forest.”