Steven Rubin

Artist Statement
The modern zoo, on first glance, appears as a harmonious locale of mutual benefit for animals and humans alike. Zoo animals are clearly provided for – their natural predators no longer a concern, their daily imperative to find food always satisfied, their species’ survival protected in new naturalistic displays that replace the egregiously cruel cages of yesteryear. Humans get enormous benefit as well – families are entertained, children see the prototypes for their stuffed animals, researchers advance their knowledge and hosting cities get to boost their civic pride and revenue. Seems like a win-win until you recall just who designed the place and who holds the keys. As much as zoos are about admiring and preserving the animal kingdom they are also less overtly about keeping it under human dominion.

This body of work examines the zoo as a complex meeting ground where animal needs and the human desire for spectacle and control meet, mingle and conflict. Through a series of photographs of human and animal interaction at the San Diego Zoo, this visual essay (from which this single image is selected) playfully explores larger issues and conflicting attitudes toward nature and its man-made destruction and simultaneous reconstruction in the zoo. In essence, the work constitutes a visual form of anthrozoology – the study of human and animal relations – in a meeting place where conflict runs wild.

Bio
Steven Rubin has photographed on assignment in Iraq, Rwanda, Kosovo, Pakistan, Turkey, Chile and Cuba, and throughout the United States. His images have been published in The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, Time, Newsweek, Mother Jones and The Village Voice, and internationally in The London Independent Magazine, Stern, GEO, Focus and L’Express, among numerous other venues. His pictures have also appeared in the publications of Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, The Ford Foundation, the Soros Foundation and the Southern Poverty Law Center. He is the recipient of the Leica Medal of Excellence, a New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Fellowship, a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard and an Alicia Patterson Journalism Fellowship. He was a Media Fellow with the Open Society Institute – New York, and a Community Fellow with the Open Society Institute – Baltimore, where he founded and directed the innovative program Healing Images, which provides digital cameras, instruction and therapy to survivors of torture.

A graduate of Reed College, he is presently finishing his MFA at the University of California, San Diego. He will be an Assistant Professor of Photography at Penn State University beginning in January 2008.