Amy Stein’s exhibition Domesticated at New York’s ClampArt gallery last September featured fine colour photographs of wild animals intruding into human settlements. She was in Australia recently and showed the work at the Australian Centre for Photography. Stein has an excellent and popular blog which has a link on my blogroll (I hope she doesn’t mind).

The confrontations of human and animal are compelling, funny and disturbing at the same time. If you’re unprepared you wonder how she managed to capture these momentary encounters without the usual flaws of quickly grabbed shots – camera shake and blur, tilted horizon etc. It soon dawns on you that they are set-ups, staged for the camera.

A gallery visitor strode up to the counter and asked, “So how does she do it?”

The eventual answer: “I believe she uses a lot of … taxidermy”.

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