Empathy and Earth

Why animals? Why toys? These are not rhetorical questions. They are the ones I kept asking myself while making this series — and they are the ones each photograph quietly returns to the person standing in front of it.

What makes the essential difference between a human and an animal? What in our relationship to other beings says that we can be merciful — or more dangerous than the cruelest beasts?

There is something that happens when a child believes a toy is alive. Feeds it. Covers it at night so it doesn’t get cold. Enters its world and makes it real, filled with care and equality. That child is not deluded. That child understands something most adults have agreed to forget.

The Latin word anima — soul — has almost the same root as animal. I didn’t invent that connection. I just pointed a lens at it.

By replacing living models with plastic replicas, I was pointing to something uncomfortable: that we may one day need replicas to remember what we lost. That the copy arrives before the disappearance — and that nobody notices.

Each animal in this series carries a human weight. The gorilla’s maternal stillness. The elephant’s fear. The polar bear adrift. I didn’t anthropomorphize them — they came already carrying these things. I just controlled the light.

What this cycle asks is simple: whose hands are these? And what are we holding?