Author Description

Welcome to Animal Portraits, Wanted Dead or Alive. This is a book about animal psychology and about animal dignity. You will find 136 photographs of cats, donkeys, ponies, chicken, dogs, sheep, birds, reptiles, insects and other animals. With the title I want to signify a couple of ideas. Firstly, how close animals and humans resemble. The portraits show the human nature inhabiting in the animals, their feelings, their looks when dead or alive, when happy, bored, fearful or sad. Whoever has lived in close contact with farm animals knows that they have their own personalities, that each animal is an individual with feelings. Secondly, this books also shows the effects of coexistence between humans and animals and how we humans treat animals differently, according to their economic value. Thus, a pig, one of the five most intelligent animals on earth apart from humans, are treated severely while companion animals are pampered and even idolized or treated like baby-substitutes. Others are valuable to look at only, and they are kept in cages for leisure. On the whole, I think that we humans treat animals in an utilitarian way, to suit our needs, our economic, nourishing and psychological needs. If the animal is good for company and affection, we love it, even as a kid, as you will see here. If the animal is good for food, we design it, we raise it and we kill it to keep up us alive, independently of whether this animal is intelligent and capable of giving us companionship, we simply eat it. Sometimes, we use animals for economic purposes, like horses for the police force, and then we kill them when they are not useful any more. I have no doubt that all the beautiful ponies you will see here will end their lives in a miserable slaughterhouse. All cows go to the “sausage”, as one farmer put it. On the other side, the purpose of the images is evidently artistic, always striving to achieve some kind of artistic significance in the portraiture of animals.