Part of the Editor's Choice series.
When summer comes around, it brings association with it: cars with windows rolled down and radios turned up, barbecues, skies staying light as hot days cool down into evening. Summer also brings thoughts of oceans, of pools, of the coolness of water, of the quiet, see-through, parallel world that always exists just beneath the ocean’s surface.
The Norwegian photographer Per Maning began making regular trips to an aquarium on the west coast of Denmark to photograph a group of seals in 1988. These photographs are one part of a much larger project Maning began in the early ’80s, when he photographed every day of the last three years of his Labrador Retriever, Leo’s, life. The photographs of Leo, never sentimental and often startling, did not document physical decline, but revealed the dog’s identity, energy, and spirit, and reflected the growth of Maning’s own self-awareness in the process.
Since then, Maning has continued to photograph animals. He spent one entire summer photographing cows in a pasture, and months and months photographing pigs on a farm. For the last eight years he has returned to an aquarium in western Denmark to take pictures of a group of seals. His toned black and white pictures, as elegantly abstract as they are eloquent, represented Norway in the last Venice Biennale—they are instructive. Seated on the dry side of a sheet of thick glass, Maning has patiently watched the seals swim and float by and made pictures of them, not as anthropomorphized zoo “victims,” but as creatures whose existence reminds us of the psyche of the animals in each of us.
—Marvin Heiferman
Yunes were human once. / They nursed babies and baked bread and made love beneath the shade of the willow tree. / Then they were drowned in the bog on the edge of town. / The marshlands kept them flawless. / Their skin tanned tight as a drum skin, sealing their spirits inside like caged dogs.
Vast plates shifted littler ones / with constant sounds and heat terrible / Then there was a cleft and so a river
Leonard changed lanes without using his blinker, as was his habit.
Originally published in
Featuring interviews with Martha Plimpton, Irvine Welsh, Jeffrey Vallance, Nick Pappas, Mark Eitzel, Lee Breuer, Ornette Coleman, Cheick Oumar Sissoko, Janwillem van de Wetering, and Ada Gay Griffin & Michelle Parkerson on Audre Lorde.
Work that is just about the technical or conceptual, personal or political, is fine; it meets the world with what’s in fashion. But there’s something else bordering on magic, that brings an artwork home, makes it land and resonate. You can’t really teach that so much as conjure it.
Kara Walker
