About the word “Animal”
Sometimes a single word shapes the way we see the world. There is a quiet assumption hidden in the word animal.
We use it as though it describes something clearly separate from ourselves. The word draws a line through the living world: on one side, humans; on the other, everything else that breathes, hunts, grazes, migrates, or sings.
Most of the time we speak the word without noticing the boundary it carries. Yet the more time I spend photographing the living world, the more fragile that boundary begins to feel.
In different places I have encountered animals in ways that unsettled the certainty of that line. I have listened to stories of elephants regarded as ancestors, of insects woven into seasonal traditions, of birds surviving on the waste of human societies. I have watched creatures move through landscapes shaped almost entirely by people — along roadsides, through cities, across fields and forests threaded with human histories.
Again and again I am reminded that the world does not organize itself according to the categories we give it. Life, instead, unfolds as a web of relationships — often messy, interwoven, and constantly reshaped by the presence of others. The boundaries between lives are far more porous than we tend to imagine.
Yet, our language still draws these boundaries whenever we try to define who we are. In naming ourselves, we inevitably name what we believe ourselves not to be. And in that quiet act of naming things, the word animal begins to suggest separation.
The landscapes I encounter suggest something closer to entanglement. And for much of human history, this entanglement was more openly acknowledged. In many cultures, animals move through stories not simply as inhabitants of nature but as companions, messengers, tricksters, teachers. They appear in myths and rituals not as symbols of distance but as participants in a shared world.
Somewhere along the way, many modern societies began to imagine that the human world and the animal world were different places. Yet the longer I work as a photographer, the more that idea begins to dissolve. Animals continue to live within the environments we create. They adapt to our cities, follow our agriculture, survive within the unintended consequences of our economies. Some disappear as our landscapes change. Others emerge in unexpected ways, occupying spaces we barely notice.
In these encounters, the word animal begins to feel less like a description and more like a question. What does it really mean to draw a line between ourselves and the rest of life? And what happens when that line turns out to be far more uncertain than we imagined?
Photography, for me, has become a way of lingering in that uncertainty. Not to resolve it, but to observe it carefully. To look at the places where human lives and other lives meet — sometimes in conflict, sometimes in coexistence, sometimes in ways that resist simple explanation.
The word animal may suggest distance.
But the longer I look, the more that distance begins to dissolve, revealing something older and harder than language itself; life moving through the same fragile world.