Marketing Animals - Antennae The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture

Fig. 6. Joe Zammit-Lucia
#2, photography, 2008 Joe Zammit-Lucia
specimen of species and, as we shall see later,
places him or her in a “nature” that is separate
from the human.
Few artists depict animals as “specific
individuals.” Instead they “use animals as
metaphors or symbols for the human condition,
or as generic signifiers for the natural world” (Watt
2010, 77). In fact, “most forms of contemporary
animal representation, whether or not in lensbased
media, fail effectively to communicate an
animal’s individuality, singularity or particularity”
(Baker 2000, 179) [1] .
Zammit-Lucia’s animal art focuses
unashamedly on animals as unique individuals in
the same way as the human studio portrait
focuses on the individual portrayed. The artist’s
hypothesis is that our embedded, reflexive
reaction to human portraiture can be turned to
an advantage when used in animal
representation. Focusing largely on threatened or
endangered species, the artist adopts a
representational approach that (i) alters the
context in which the animal is presented (i.e., a
studio-like setting vs. in the wild or in a captive
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setting), and (ii) frames the animal representation
to mimic a human studio portrait (i.e., in a way
that is culturally more often associated with
human representation). The idea of animal
individuality in these images, therefore, does not
depend exclusively (nor even primarily) on the
representational form of the animal – the
recognition of the specific features of the
individual animal – but rather on the
appropriation of the general style of the human
studio portrait and the impact of that style on the
viewer’s spontaneous reactions to the imagery.
This approach builds on the fundamentals of
human portraiture where, as we have discussed
above, individuality, personality and status are not
communicated through uniqueness of features,
but through the overall form, composition,
context, and other features of the complete
portrait.
Zammit-Lucia uses other devices to
influence the subject-viewer interaction. Direct
eye contact is common and can create a
tension between the observed and the observer
in the viewer-portrait interaction. The subject’s