Animality: 100 Years of Photographs

Come and “meet” a menagerie of our furry, finned, and feathered associates depicted throughout greater than 100 images and archival objects from the CCP’s assortment. 

Animality: 100 Years of Photographs options a variety of photographic codecs, a various group of photographers, and all method of animals throughout a century of time. Visitors of all ages are invited to discover and uncover the methods images reveal points of the various sorts of relationships between people and animals.

Animality was created in collaboration with seven University of Arizona honors college students—Dylan Brown, Maya Cervantes, Emma Charles, Charles Elliott, Emily Hogg, Emma Mireles, and Shay Parchem—who participated in professors Netzin and Dieter Steklis’s Fall 2025 course, Human and Animal Interrelationships. The interdisciplinary exhibition is organized round eleven thematic groupings, which collectively deal with human-animal interactions, human and animal expressions, and animal welfare.

More methods to look

CCP is inviting the general public to turn into a part of the exhibition, too: guests can submit their own animal photographs for “Animals Everywhere,” a rotating neighborhood showcase displayed on a monitor simply outdoors the gallery.

A full slate of programming accompanies the exhibition:

• SNAP (Social Night of Art and Photography) — Sept. 3, 5-7 p.m., that includes a dialog with Senf and professors H. Dieter Steklis and Netzin Steklis from the School of Animal & Comparative Biomedical Sciences
• Community Day — Oct. 10, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., lecture by Pryor Dodge, writer of “YLLA, The Birth of Modern Animal Photography”
• Artist Talk — Nov. 6, 5:30-6:30 p.m., with photographer and interdisciplinary artist Colleen Plumb
• Book Club Discussion — Nov. 7, 11 a.m. to midday

A century of photographers

The exhibition’s subtitle, “100 Years of Photographs,” displays the vary of its holdings: the earliest picture dates to the late nineteenth century, and the latest from inside the final decade. Photojournalism, fine-art pictures, social documentary and early Twentieth-century pictorialism all seem aspect by aspect.

Some of the photographers in “Animality” are among the many most important figures in Twentieth-century American pictures, together with Garry Winogrand, whose stressed road pictures helped outline the period, and W. Eugene Smith, whose picture essays for Life journal basically invented the fashionable documentary picture essay. Andreas Feininger and Louise Dahl-Wolfe, each extensively influential of their respective specialties of technical instruction and style pictures, are additionally represented, alongside John Gutmann and Rosalind Fox Solomon. “Some of these photographers are known for their animal pictures,” Senf mentioned. “Some, like Ansel Adams, took some pictures of animals because he took a lot of pictures, but he never set out to make pictures of animals in particular.”

One defining animal photographer

One photographer will get her personal mini exhibit inside the exhibition. A devoted part is dedicated to Ylla (Camilla Koffler, 1911-1955), whom Senf calls the defining animal photographer of her period — a Vienna-born artist who fled Nazi-occupied France for New York and constructed a global profession photographing animals for magazines, commercials and her personal books, together with a number of with “Goodnight Moon” writer Margaret Wise Brown. Ylla’s archive is held by CCP, and the exhibition presents a slideshow of 100 of her images alongside portraits, correspondence, journal tear sheets and different materials from her profession. She died at 44 whereas photographing an oxen-cart race in India, a narrative instructed in full in a companion characteristic printed alongside this one.