Robin Schwartz: Amelia and the Animals

2014 | Art, Photography & Fashion

Amelia is fourteen years old. In many ways, she is your average American teenager: since she was three years old, she has been her mothers muse and the subject of her photographs. However, not every mom is a world-class photographer with a predilection for photographing animals. And its 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 Schwartzs second monograph featuring this collaborative photographic series dedicated to documenting her and Amelias 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 mother daughter journey into invented worlds, of fables they enact together. Schwartz concludes, Photography gives us the opportunity to access our dreams, to discover the extraordinary.

Robin Schwartz (Author)

Lena Dunham (Author)

Amelia Paul Forman (Author)