Robin Schwartz
Amelia & the Animals
Aperture (Publisher)
Published on 6. October 2014
Book
Hardback
136 pages
978-1-59711-278-9 (ISBN)
Description
Amelia is fourteen years old. In many ways, she is your average American teenager: since she was three years old, she has been her mother's muse and the subject of her photographs. However, not every mom is a world-class photographer with a predilection for photographing animals. And it's not every teenager who has portraits of herself with elephants, llamas, ponies, tigers, kangaroos, chimpanzees, and endless dogs, cats, and other animals-portraits that hang in the collections of major art museums around the world. Amelia and the Animals is Robin Schwartz's second monograph featuring this collaborative photographic series dedicated to documenting her and Amelia's adventures among the animals. As Schwartz puts it, "Photography is a means for Amelia to meet animals. Until recently, she took these opportunities for granted. She didn't realize how unusual her encounters were until everyone started to tell her how lucky she was to meet so many animals." Nonetheless, these images are more than documents of Amelia and her rapport with animals; they offer a meditation on the nature of interspecies communication and serve as evidence of a shared motherdaughter journey into invented worlds, of fables they enact together. Schwartz concludes, "Photography gives us the opportunity to access our dreams, to discover the extraordinary."
Reviews / Votes
Robin Schwartz's images of animals have appeared in museum and galleries around the world, and her daughter Amelia has spent her lifetime among the animals her mother has photographed.--Phil Bicker"TIME Lightbox" (09/08/2014) When potrait photographer Robin Schwartz took her 3-year-old daughter to the circus, she never expected the toddler to fall in love. But once Amelia met a baby chimp named Ricky, "the two of them could not stop hugging," says Schwartz who captured the mutual affection with her camera. That encounter inspired Schwartz to continue photographing the ways her daughter now 15, bonds with animals. The pair have become creative partners, dreaming up whimsical sweet potraits with all kinds of furry friends: Amelia leading the way for six llamas, curling up among kangaroos, cuddling with a camel, sitting next to a wallaby at a kitchen table. The 12-year project is now a book, Amelia and the Animals. "We try to create a world where there is no line between humans and animals," says Schwartz.--Abigail Libers"O Magazine" (11/01/2014) Both mother and daughter have always felt a strong connection with animals, and that's what Schwartz means to show in her new book, Amelia & the Animals, which will be released next month.--Gabrielle Plucknette"NYmag.com, Science of Us" (09/22/2014) Rickard is following that work up with a new book called "N.A.," where he continues to mine the Internet for views of America that are anything but idyllic. This time, he snatches frame grabs from videos that were made on cell phones and uploaded to YouTube.The book is not a photojournalistic document - the lack of captions and context asks us to create our own narratives. The printed text in the book includes a poem created using comments from YouTube. And the low resolution of the frame grabs mostly protects the identities of the subjects and gives the visceral imagery an impressionistic gloss.--Rebecca Horne"CNN Living" (09/25/2014)More details
Language
English
Place of publication
New York
United States
Illustrations
Illustrated in colour throughout
Dimensions
Height: 282 mm
Width: 228 mm
Thickness: 20 mm
Weight
1007 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-59711-278-9 (9781597112789)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Robin Schwartz earned an MFA in photography from Pratt Institute, and her photographs are held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art, both New York; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Brooklyn Museum; Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia; Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris; and Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany. She is an assistant professor of photography at William Paterson University and lives in New Jersey with her husband, Robert Forman, daughter, Amelia, and five companion animals. Robin Schwartz earned an MFA in photography from Pratt Institute, and her photographs are held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art, both New York; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Brooklyn Museum; Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia; Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris; and Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany. She is an assistant professor of photography at William Paterson University and lives in New Jersey with her husband, Robert Forman, daughter, Amelia, and five companion animals. Amelia Paul Forman is a high schooler, animal lover, and aspiring biologist. She writes, draws, photographs, and travels. Donna Gustafson is the Andrew W. Mellon Liaison for Academic Programs and Curator at the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, and a member of the graduate faculty in art history. Her recent exhibitions include Striking Resemblance: The Changing Art of Portraiture, Lalla Essaydi: Les Femmes du Maroc, and at/around/beyond.