In Arles, the Model Bites Back

In May 1852, Juan de Borbón, Count of Montizón, a Spanish Bourbon exiled in London, set up his camera before the pool of Obaysch, the star hippopotamus of the London Zoo at Regent’s Park. The pachyderm fills the foreground. Behind him, visitors crowd against the railings. Several turn their heads toward the operator, “as though the act of photographing outdid, in sheer spectacle, the animal’s corpulent torpor,” writes Vincent Lavoie, scientific advisor to the exhibition.

The journalist Ernest Lacan consecrated the print as early as 1856: “Monsieur le Comte de Montizón was the first to apply photographic processes to the representation of living animals.” Living, certainly, though the attentive eye will note the animal’s dejected air, and an ugly scar across its left flank. The Catholic Standard, in 1850, supplies its origin: hunted along the riverbank after men had wounded its mother, the calf “was only caught when one of the men drove the boat hook into its flank.”

This pioneering image, hung near the start of the show beside a more recent rhinoceros portrait by Balthasar Burkhard, already reveals, Lavoie goes on, “the expression of a violence endured, the origin of a life subjected to the gaze of others.” In the book published by Éditions Textuel, the British essayist John Berger goes further: “Nowhere in a zoo can a stranger encounter the look of an animal.” Lavoie qualifies this: that same stranger, he notes, now encounters, in the same alleys, “an entirely new species, one far from shy: the photographer.”

Masahisa Fukase, Erimo Cape, 1976, series Ravens. Courtesy of Masahisa Fukase Archives and Michael Hoppen Gallery UK.

And yet, in the nineteenth century, studios still often relied on stuffed animals, arranged in natural settings “to create the illusion of life.” The living animal, when called upon, posed under duress, caged, tethered, muzzled, more often than not. Around 1860, Alfred Cailliez photographed a lion tamer and his lion for the carte-de-visite format. Ottomar Anschütz lined up dressage horses in attitudes calibrated to the second. In this performative chapter, photography sides with the whip: to “dispose of the animal’s body, assign it a role, demand a gesture or a posture,” confirming thereby “the hierarchy between the one who commands and the one who obeys.”

A crack runs beneath this veneer, even so. “With the advent of the first studios, the bourgeoisie brought its household animals to pose for the photographer,” notes Nathalie Herschdorfer, director of Photo Elysée, the cantonal museum of photography in Lausanne, and curator of the exhibition. To be photographed with one’s dog was, Lavoie observes, “an act steeped in tenderness toward the animal.” Around 1855, a stereoscopic daguerreotype by Désiré-François Millet installs a poodle on an armchair, in the exact seat of the notable. The title says it all: Portrait of a Poodle Looking at the Photographer. The protocol of portraiture slips from one species to another.

“The gaze is never neutral,” Herschdorfer reminds us. “Depending on context, the same animal changes status.” She continues: “Passing from object to subject, the animal follows, in the twenty-first century, a path of rehabilitation, one that does not erase the balance of power still opposing it to humans.” One photograph condenses that imbalance entirely. In 2007, at Ogere-Remo, Nigeria, Pieter Hugo photographed the hyena Mainasara, muzzled in braided cord, rearing against Abdullahi Mohammed, a showman who draws his living from the spectacle the wild animal provides, in the manner of the bear-tamers of old.

Pieter Hugo, Abdullahi Mohammed with Mainasara, Ogere-Remo, Nigeria, 2007. Courtesy of the artist and Stevenson, Cape Town/Amsterdam.

A grim spectacle. “No animal formally consents to being photographed, that much is obvious,” Lavoie insists. “Its image, then, it can only endure.” Others turn the protocols of human portraiture back on themselves. “Struck by the resemblance between primate and human faces,” James Mollison photographed, from Cameroon to Indonesia, gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos, and orangutans, many of them orphaned by the bushmeat trade, using the strict aesthetic of the identity photograph; “these faces unsettle the border between human and animal,” writes Herschdorfer.

Jean-Baptiste Huynh gives a dog named Buckley the chiaroscuro of a studio portrait, one dark eye surfacing beneath the fur with the gravity of a human face. The stakes, Herschdorfer continues, lie in considering the animal “not as a mere pictured object, but as a partner in relation, one that helps us rethink how we inhabit the world, and step outside a strictly human gaze.”

Jean-Baptiste Huynh, Buckley, 1999. Courtesy of the artist.

Affection, for its part, comes disguised as comedy. On a New York stoop, in 2000, Elliott Erwitt frames a bulldog perched on its owner’s lap: the dog’s head crowns the man’s sandaled body, and the composite creature stares down the lens with total composure. Berger, quoted in the book’s epigraph, illuminates what we are really seeking here: “With their parallel lives, animals offer man a companionship which is different from any offered by human exchange. Different because it is a companionship offered to the loneliness of man as a species.”

Eliott Erwitt, New York City, USA, 2000. Courtesy of the artist and Magnum Photos.

These images, Herschdorfer concedes, “often say more about humanity than about the animal world.” Far from any stoop, the zoologist Simona Kossak spent years living in her forest house at Dziedzinka, deep in the Białowieża forest, among lynxes, ravens, and wild boar: a “quest for harmony” lived at animal height.

No exhibition on this subject would be complete without its harshest chapter, the one that shows what animals endure before they reach our plates. Reportage from factory farms, slaughterhouses, laboratories: here, “the image acts as evidence.” An anonymous print lines up dead horses in a Paris slaughterhouse, circa 1870; Sheng-Wen Lo photographs a polar bear held captive in a Chinese ocean park.

“Seeing commits us.” Domestication has never suspended domination. But photography has, in the end, changed sides, by changing how it looks. “Perhaps, instead of confining animals, we should learn to photograph them better, for the camera alone seems capable of bringing forth the light they carry within them,” suggests the philosopher Emanuele Coccia, in an essay whose mischievous title flips the hierarchy between the two disciplines in a single stroke: Zoology Is a Branch of Photography.

“Animal Model: 200 Years of Photography” runs at the Rencontres d’Arles photography festival through October 4, 2026.

Animal Model: 200 Years of Photography, edited by Nathalie Herschdorfer, with contributions by Vincent Lavoie and Emanuele Coccia, is published by Éditions Textuel, 2026.