ANIMALIA [Hardcover]

Henry Horenstein (Photographer), Elizabeth Werby (Foreword)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1, 2008

“Though most photographers are driven to find a new vision, even the best fail more often than they succeed. In [these images], Horenstein has succeeded to a dazzling degree, evading the abundant clichés of animal photography at every turn.”—Owen Edwards

ANIMALIA is a collection of the best of noted photographer Henry Horenstein’s images of sea and land creatures. Described variously as evocative, mysterious, romantic, surprising, and weird, Horenstein’s abstract images will make the viewer see otherwise familiar animals in a new and different light. Printed in sumptuous sepia duotones, ANIMALIA will make an elegant gift book for the animal or photography lover among your friends and family members.

Horenstein’s ANIMALIA photographs will be on view at the Harvard Museum of Natural History (www.hmnh.harvard.edu) though summer 2008. The exhibit will then tour nationally at a variety of museums and other venues through the traveling exhibition company art2art (www.art2art.org).

Henry Horenstein is author of over thirty books and monographs published by Viking, Chronicle, powerHouse, Stewart, Tabori & Chang, and Pond Press, including Honky Tonk, Humans, Racing Days, Creatures, Aquatics, Canine, and Close Relations. Photography students worldwide have used his textbooks, including Black & White Photography, published by Little, Brown, which has sold close to seven hundred thousand copies to date. Horenstein lives in Boston and is a professor of photography at Rhode Island School of Design. A range of his work can be seen at www.horenstein.com.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Horenstein is author of over 30 books, including monographs , published by Viking, Chronicle, powerHouse, Stewart, Tabori, Change, and Pond Press Henry's textbooks have been widely used by photography students worldwide, including Black & White Photography, published by Little, Brown, which has sold close to 700,000 copies to date. Henry is a professor of photography at Rhode Island School of Design.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 80 pages
• Publisher: Pond Press (April 1, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0976195526
• ISBN-13: 978-0976195528
• Product Dimensions: 12.1 x 10.2 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,731,063 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Henry Horenstein is a widely published and exhibited professional photographer and the author of more than two dozen books, including the classic texts Black & White Photography and Beyond Basic Photography, and monographs such as Honky Tonk, Animalia, Show, Close Relations, and Racing Days. Horenstein is professor of photography at the Rhode Island School of Design. You can see his work at www.horenstein.com.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars AMAZINGLY DETAILED PHOTOGRAPHY, July 16, 2008

By 

Gail Cooke (TX, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: ANIMALIA (Hardcover)

You may think you know what an animal looks like but, really, you don't until you study these amazing photographs by Henry Hortenstein. A photographer, author, and teacher for some 35 years, he is an acknowledged master of each of these fields.

Rather than a traditional photo that we often see - an animal captured in its colorful habitat, Hortenstein calls our attention to detail in 64 duotone photographs. It is as if we were looking at an Asian elephant's foot or a giraffe's legs or a crane's neck through a magnifying glass.

Elisabeth Werby, Executive Director, Harvard Museum of Natural History, says it best in her informative forward: "His pictures challenge us to look more closely, to ask questions and make connections. We think about form and function; the relationship between an elephant's foot, a horse's hoof, and our own toes.........Examining these photographs, we become scientists and discoverers."

This remarkable volume holds not only the best of Hortenstein's work focusing on the images of animals but also 35 unpublished images. It is a book we find ourselves returning to again and again, to marvel and to wonder.

Highly recommended.

- Gail Cooke

4.0 out of 5 stars Animalia, August 29, 2008

By 

Judith Eastburn (Iowa) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: ANIMALIA (Hardcover)

This is a lovely book, making excellent use of the qualities of black and white photography.
There is great variety in the subjects, but a common simplifying approach to all of them.
Lighting and cropping transform these creatures to magical images and lead the viewer to
seeing them in new and unusual ways.

4.0 out of 5 stars photography seeing animals in a new light, July 14, 2008

By 

Henry Berry "Henry Berry" (Southport, CT) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: ANIMALIA (Hardcover)

Horenstein takes photographs of animals, but he is not a naturalist. The photographs were taken in zoos and aquariums. While one might think this would give them a certain "staged" quality or limitation, an artificiality or familiarity as photographs, this is not the case--far from it. The photographs were exhibited (through June 2008) at the Harvard Museum of Natural History as a part of its "lessons in looking" project. This project aimed at being provocative and "chang[ing] the frame" of viewers' experiences with nature photography; as the Museum's Director Elisabeth Werby explains in her Foreword. Horenstein's 64 duotone photographs of animals--actually mostly parts of animals--patently work toward this end.

This skilled, imaginative, idiosyncratic photographer focuses sharply on a specific part, or a detail, of an animal. Such sharp focus--as in some photographs by Edward Weston, for example--leaves the subject so that the viewer does not easily recognize it. Horenstein does not go this far, however. His aim is not to demonstrate the power of the camera to microscopically hone in on a subject in such a way that one cannot recognize it; but rather to enlarge the viewer's awareness of and connection with his subjects of animals. The photographs are a kind of synecdoche. The parts of an animal Horenstein focuses on are usually ones the viewer associates with it from seeing many ordinary photographs or films of it or from school classes in the world of nature. The viewer knows an octopus from a tentacle lined with suction cups; an Emperor penguin from its elongated white belly; a dolphin from its sleek, bulbous shape.

Horenstein is patient, too. Since "you can't tell an elephant where to stand [or] ask a skate to smile...you must be very patient and wait" for the opportunity to take a good picture, he tells in his Photographer's Note. But there's more than simply waiting for the right moment. The photographer achieves his extraordinary effects by using macro lenses and by working with grainy, black-and-white film, then developing it in sepia to give it "an old school, timeless feel." It works: The combination of photographs which are at once familiar and challenging and technicalities of film and development used make a unique, lingering impression. It is unlikely most viewers will see the animals in Horenstein's photographs ever again without seeing them or thinking about them in some respect as they were led to see and consider them with these photographs.