Amy Stein

Amy Stein is a brilliant photographer who has taken nature photography and turned it on it's head. Nature photography involves a certain amount of stealth and is akin to hunting in the pursuit of a good shot. Amy appropriates the kill for her own "hunt" by setting up mounted taxidermy in urban landscapes to re-create fantastical nightmares of sub-urban mothers and disturbing reflections on our impact on wilderness habitat. To engage in more horror visit her website amysteinphoto.com

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. 

~ Amy Stein

 

 The other series of Amy's photos that I love and I wish she would expand (Amy if you're reading please please make more!) is the women and guns series. These images are fascinating to me for the cultural implications of gender, masculinity, power and expectations of gender roles within society. I also am interested in how the men interact with the women or object in the image.