Britta Jaschinski, is one of the premier contemporary photographers engaged in the work of representing animals. Born in 1965 in Bremen, Germany, she has lived and worked in London since 1993, after completing a degree in photography at the Arts University Bournemouth in South England. Jaschinski is a photographer of nature – but not in its conventional forms. While her work encompasses the inherent beauty and purity of the natural world, she is also keenly attuned to the frailty of nature: its susceptibility to manipulation and desecration at the hands of its most self-important element, homo sapiens. In the 1990s, Jaschinski worked extensively to document the sad and scary world of captive animals in zoos. Her portraits of these animals were poignant and often pathetic. Dark, disjointed representations of creatures in concrete and metal compounds conveyed the displacement that characterized their existence. ZOO gained her instant recognition in 1996 following a show at the Photographers Gallery in London and an accompanying book, depicting haunting black and white images from zoos around the world (published by Phaidon Press). There followed a series of awards.

Her book WILD THINGS was launched in 2003, published by Thames & Hudson UK. Wild Things combines photography of animals and landscape in a way that prompts people to determine for ourselves the relationship between living creatures and their environment. The world seen here is majestic, transcendent, but also, suddenly, threatened. Despite its inherent power, it could easily become barren, sterile, toxic. Nature is out there, universal and eternal, and then, perhaps, it is gone.

Between 2005 and 2010 Jaschinski worked on DARK, a series of images looking at the otherness of animals. These images are profoundly troubling. They feature individual animals in settings that are often disorienting — against blank backdrops — because they are unnatural: many of the animals we see are starkly alienated from their natural habitat. The aesthetic of her photography exacerbates viewers’ sense of disorientation as we look at images that are dark, or grainy, or blurry, or silhouetted, or otherwise weirdly lit and brusquely cropped.

In 2012 and in 2014 she travelled to China and documented animals at their worse suffering. These animals are shoddy, tatty, broken. We cannot help but flinch away from meeting their gaze, with the embarrassing consciousness that we (as a species) are responsible for their suffering. These encounters portray nothing but constraint and torture: unimaginable abrogation of the animals’ normalcy, their autonomy, and their happiness. This is what happens to animals in the clutches of human culture. Her photographs are an homage to the animal’s nobility and an angry protest at their constraints. Jaschinski’s work is published and exhibited world-wide. She has received a number of major awards.