Zoo Animals Versus Wild Animals; Jaschinski’s Camera Versus the Crittercam in the Art of Framing the Other

“I felt that I photographed something which I didn’t know. And it was almost like the camera saw it, not me,” –Britta Jaschinski

Steve Baker, in ‘Hunted by the Animal’, draws attention to the pervasive presence of the animal in contemporary art: it becomes the Other, both “vividly present” and “bewilderingly absent”. The animal both fascinates and repels as it can act as a signifier for the holistic grace of nature as much as for human estrangement from “the Real”.

Britta Jaschinski’s photos of animals in zoos and in the wild have become iconic. They are aesthetically provocative, emotive and morally ambiguous: they have been interpreted in various, even contradictory, ways. Baker claims Jaschinski’s photos in Wild Things visually collapse the arbitrary conceptual divide between zoo animals and wild animals, and yet her photos have also been adopted by the Born Free Poster Campaign, presumably, because they highlight the misery of captured animals.

The Guardian Weekend, in a quote proudly reproduced on Jaschinski’s website, states, “Jaschinski’s photos remind us what we stand to lose.’ The photos are definitely somewhat melancholic—is this because they mirror the loss of animals in an increasingly technologized world? John Berger has argued that the contemporary art world’s obsession with animals can be read as a sort of memorial to them: he believes that animals have already been largely lost to modern man. While a palpable sense of loss may be inherent in some contemporary works of art, this tendency is more likely a reflection of a human sense of alienation from the self, than a signification of the real lose of animals.

According to Lacan, human’s have an irking and unsettling sense of incompleteness and dislocation from their environment; animals, on the other hand, have been immobilised, forever frozen in the Mirror Stage—they are not “prey to language” and thus have no desire and no sense of the Other. With the current limited linguistic knowledge of animal language systems, it appears that animals lack the complex language faculty possessed by humans, and therefore, according to Lacan, are also without desire or a subconscious (of course, let us not forget that he said the same thing about women!). According to Lacan’s model, the human voyeuristic desire for the animal Other is an asymmetrical one: humans may yearn for the animal other, but, for animals, the human is not an Other at all and cannot really exist outside of the entire gelatinous mass that constitutes “the Real”.

If Jaschinski’s photos represent the melancholy loss of and yearning for the wild Other that stems from a purely human desire to return to “the Real”, then Crittercam claims to do the opposite: rather than generating images of animals framed as desired Others, Crittercam promises temporary embodiment within the Other that can override humanity and offer a first hand experience of animal subjectivity.







The Crittercam slogan of loosing one’s humanity to gain access to an animal’s perspective, along with the corporal world invoked by the editing of the Crittercam footage, and described by Haraway, is a shame, a farce, a fantasy. In the end we are, of course, limited to our own sense organs and locked out of a Sperm Whale’s echolocative and markedly different perception.

But the Crittercam, like the animals it is attached to, “senses” the world differently than a human body: it can collect and measure data (such as depth, speed, temp.) that our sense organs cannot even compute. This collection of data can be used to gain knowledge about the animal subject. The animals, roaming freely in their native habitats, are acting as subjects on their own terms. Haraway emphasises the importance of acknowledging this subjectivity; she even highlights the necessity of striving towards interspecies communication:

We have to learn who they [animals] are in all their nonunitary otherness in order to have a conversation on the basis of carefully constructed, multi-sensory, compounded languages.

If these “multi-sensory, compounded languages” ever develop, they may very well be reliant on technologies that transcend human physiology and can decode and interpret different modes of perception that allow various animal species to perceive and make sense of their habitats through sense organs different from our own. This venture will also most likely entail “infoldings of the flesh” that will act as supplementary human sense organs to compensate for our inherent differences.

The ethical question that arises in exploring the relationship between animals and humans, whether through art or science, is formed around the contested notion of animal subjectivity. Eduardo Kac has said that his GFP bunny is the beginning of a new form of art that entails the “creation of an art subject rather than an art object”. But couldn’t one easily restructure this sentence and generate a very different statement that is actually equally true: The GFP bunny is the objectification of a subject in the name of art. A lot of contemporary art works, like the GFP bunny, have an aesthetic and conceptual allure that fascinates the viewer with its sheer uniqueness… but, when it comes right down to it, do such works do anything beyond exploiting the human desire to objectify and possess the Other? This is an open-ended question to say the least.

“Art, no matter how apparently cruelly, does not shrink from the sight of the animal. In doing so it is one of the few contemporary forms that can claim properly and respectfully to attend to the otherness of the animal.”– Steve Baker