Several ideas surface when I study Amy Stein’s fascinating collection of photos in her book Domesticated: Nature domesticated or nature habituated and human-wildlife conflicts are obvious themes, but what is nature? Do we live in a merely socially constructed nature? Does wilderness even exist? From The New Yorker:

Stein’s photographs brim with narrative, being loosely based on the townspeople’s real-life encounters with the animals living nearby. One story is of a pack of bears who decided to hibernate under a family’s home; another, of the Department of Natural Resources commissioning mechanized stuffed turkeys to catch people hunting outside the confines of their back yards.

To Stein, who staged the scenes herself, often transporting large and cumbersome taxidermied animals to specific locations, the images are about a kind of tension, the way that the worlds of the deer, bears, turkeys, and wolves brush up against that of the humans nearby. As she explained to me, the pools, homes, greenhouses, and highways are simply structures in the eyes of the animals. That bear on the cover would probably love to hop into that “lake” for a quick dip.

Here is a statement from the author, Amy Stein:

My photographs serve as modern dioramas of our new natural history. Within these scenes I explore our paradoxical relationship with the “wild” and how our conflicting impulses continue to evolve and alter the behavior of both humans and animals. We at once seek connection with the mystery and freedom of the natural world, yet we continually strive to tame the wild around us and compulsively control the wild within our own nature. Within my work I examine the primal issues of comfort and fear, dependence and determination, submission and dominance that play out in the physical and psychological encounters between man and the natural world. Increasingly, these encounters take place within the artificial ecotones we have constructed that act as both passage and barrier between domestic space and the wild.

The photographs in this series are constructed based on real stories from local newspapers and oral histories of intentional and random interactions between humans and animals. The narratives are set in and around Matamoras, a small town in Northeast Pennsylvania that borders a state forest.

The above right image is titled “Cage.”

Watering Hole: Who is the trespasser?

Window #2: Do we voluntarily condemn ourselves to prison or remove ourselves too far from the outside world?

Fast Food: This image reminds me when I use to work as a fisheries observer on trawlers fishing on Georges Bank. Shearwaters and gulls use to follow the boats tirelessly to feed off the fishermen’s discards. Nonetheless, today most gulls don’t even seem to be associated with water but simply cruise fast food parking lots and landfills for easy meals.

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