After photographer Kevin Horan moved to Chicago in 1976, he pursued a decade-long career in photojournalism. He started out as a staff photographer for the Chicago Daily News and the Chicago Sun-Times, with assignments ranging from presidential campaigns to small-town life in Russia. His work has also been featured in publications such as The New York Times Magazine, Smithsonian, LIFE, U.S. News & World Report, National Geographic, and numerous other magazines and books.
Along the way, Kevin developed an interest in looking at the planet as a very small place. He started working on projects that look at animals as people and vice-versa. His pictures are reality-based, and he enjoys finding amazing things hidden in ordinary occurrences. In his project Chattel, for example, Kevin has captured portraits of goats and sheep in an amazing way, showing their personalities and charisma as if they are human. It was an interest that stemmed from his move to Langley, WA in 2006, when these herd animals became his neighbors.
Mandy (left) and Mr Beasley (right)
© KEVIN HORAN PHOTOGRAPHS
“I am used to telling subjects that a good portrait is a collaboration between photographer and subject,” Kevin proclaims on his website. “But how do you collaborate with a goat? A goat you’ve just met?” Unsurprisingly, photographing his neighbors didn’t really work out. So Kevin sought congeners who were more used to close human contact, like on a petting zoo.
“Treated as portrait subjects, they seem to have personalities. Perhaps they do, and the photograph allows us to see it. Or perhaps the language of the photo cues us to generate the impression of a personage. One wonders if that interplay is any different here than it is in pictures of humans.”
Benett (left) and Isabella (right)
© KEVIN HORAN PHOTOGRAPHS
Jake (left) and Lizzie (right)
© KEVIN HORAN PHOTOGRAPHS
Sherlock (left) and Stanwood (right)
© KEVIN HORAN PHOTOGRAPHS
Sydney (left) and Velvet (right)
© KEVIN HORAN PHOTOGRAPHS
“These pictures insist upon active engagement of our own feelings about the souls within other beings, human or otherwise, and how visible they are from the outside. If we are paying attention to our own responses, we must grapple with the cause of our response. Do these creatures have the light of sentience inside, and I am connecting with it? Or does the application of the tradition of photographic portraiture—the lighting, pose, background—nudge us into an anthropomorphic comfort zone?”
Carl
© KEVIN HORAN PHOTOGRAPHS
More of Kevin Horan’s work can be viewed on his website. He can also be found on Facebook and LensCulture.