Zana Briski’s Animalograms are unlike anything I have seen before. To create them, Briski goes alone into the wilderness on moonless nights. She props up huge pieces of photographic paper, and then she waits. Sometimes it takes days, but her patience is rewarded when a creature wanders her way. It can be a skunk, or sometimes a bear, Coati or Ringtail.

No matter the size of the animal (or its capacity for emitting an odoriferous spray) Briski does not hide throughout the entire process. She is quiet and calm, and earns the trust of her subjects so that they both feel safe to be seen by the other. She flashes a low light that projects the animal’s silhouette onto the photographic paper so quickly that it doesn’t even startle them. The resulting images are life-sized photograms of the animals; some of her bear portraits are up to eight feet long.

The soul is something that we have attempted to define and portray throughout the ages, but when I look at Briski’s images, I think that she has finally done it. It feels like the very being of these animals are contained within the paper. We see the playful humor of a skunk through its prancing feet, the regalness of a slow moving bear, and the unexpected elegance and mystery of a ringtail. Leaves and seeds from the forest floor appear as glowing orbs of light, and trails of raindrops flow through her images like ethereal stardust floating down from the night sky. Everything from Briski’s reverential process to the creation of the final images is like a communion with the natural world.

This is not the first time that Briski’s work has had such a profound effect on me. It wasn’t until I saw this particular project that I was able to define the extraordinary through line of her different bodies of work. Whether Briski is working with humans or animals, she is able to connect with the spirit coursing through us all and then transposes souls onto paper.

- Mia Dalglish


See more of Zana’s work here.