Submission

A Kind of You (2013). Documentary work of street performing monkeys in Indonesia. The title refers to human-likeness, but also to our moral character, to the ways we deal with nature and otherness. The locations, as well as the animals, are in a grey area somewhere between nature and the urban environment, a sort of nasty or reversed side of nature photography. The main motif of this series is a question about empathy. Carrying it out requires identification, and photography is well suited to doing that. One characteristic of photography is that, via the photograph’s own relationship with reality, it arouses in the objects of the photograph the powerful presence of a subject. At the same time, a photograph has an inherent distance from the photographed space and reality, via which we view the animal and the object of the picture. The set-up that emerges out of this creates a distance between the human and the non-human, and opens up possibilities for investigating the interfaces between animal and humanity that we are unable to explain, while we are made open and receptive to them specifically through the nature of the photograph.