The Magazine of The Sierra Club
Art in the Animal Kingdom
“Animal: Exploring the Zoological World” finds aesthetics in the science
Three western green mambas (Dendroaspis viridis) arrange themselves into a rectangular composition within a clear plastic box. Photograph by Italian commercial and advertising photographer Guido Mocafico in 2003.
A lion’s mane jellyfish (Cyanea capillata), the largest known species of jellyfish, swims suspended in Arctic waters. Photograph by Alexander Semenov, a biologist and photographer at Moscow State University’s White Sea Biological Station on the Kandalaksha Gulf, in 2015.
A hazel-eyed Diana monkey (Cercopithecus diana) gives a humanness glare into the camera. Photograph by Canadian photographer Jill Greenberg in 2005 and published in her 75-portrait monograph Monkey Portraitsin 2006.
A series of six photographs shows the different forms of a single spoonworm (Thalassematid echiuran), which constantly changes shapes as it pulsates. Photograph by German zoologist and photographer Arthur Anker in 2013.
A highly magnified images reveals the pattern and colors of the membranous wings of a cicada (Cicadidae gen. sp.). Photographed on four-by-five-inch negative film through a microscope and printed on Japanese gampi paper (to mimic the fragile wings) by German artist Gregor Törzs in 2016.
An imaging technique using dyes reveals the cartilaginous skeleton of a longsnout butterfly ray (Gymnura crebripunctata). Image created by marine biologist Adam Summers in 2013.
This image focuses on the graceful curve of a crocodile’s (Crocodylus porosus) tail. Photograph by wildlife photographer Robert Clark as part of his monograph Evolution: A Visual Recordin 2016.
A light micrograph shows a male deep-sea nematode (Metadasynemella sp.). Photograph by New Zealand marine biologist Daniel Leduc in 2012.
A sweat bee (Halictus ligatus) is almost completely covered by grains of pollen, demonstrating why bees are the world’s most important pollinators. Image created in 2013 by Sam Droege, head of the US Geological Survey Native Bee Inventory and Monitoring Program, as part of an effort to catalogue portraits of all 4,000 bee species in the United States.
The zoological world is a work of art. It doesn’t exist for art’s sake, of course. Animals have their own intrinsic value. But we as humans have long seen animals as beautiful or intriguing and in need of depiction, from cave paintings to high-res scientific imagery.
“Animals and humans have been inexorably linked for as long as our species has been in existence,” writes Harvard zoologist James Hanken in the introduction of Animal: Exploring the Zoological World. We have hunted, domesticated, and too-often destroyed animals. Yet we also revere and study them—and incorporate them into our folklore and artistic expression.
Animal: Exploring the Zoological World(Phaidon Press, 2018) is a compilation of this relationship between animals and art. Curated by a team of editors, historians, and zoologists, the book delivers 300 photographs and illustrations of animals, ranging a wide span of our historic journey to get to know with whom we share this planet, from the largest mammals to the infinitesimal nematode.
The images in Animal come from many contexts: Wildlife and commercial photography, studio portraiture, as well as scientific scanning and microscopy. The works of renowned wildlife photographers like Bence Máté and Robert Clark or commercial artists like Guido Mocafico share page spreads with images produced by biologists, zoologists, and veterinarians who use these images to further understand these animals. The result is a hardbound study in science as art, and art as science. “The two disciplines are often not as separate as is sometimes suggested, but rather mutually dependent and beneficial,” writes Hanken. “Artists help zoologists to visualize and explore their subjects, while scientific discovery informs and inspires visual representation.”