Photobook in progress
(2018- Ongoing)
Book in progress
“The public purpose of zoos is to offer visitors the opportunity of looking at animals. Yet nowhere in a zoo can a stranger encounter the look of an animal. At the most, the animal’s gaze flickers and passes on. They look sideways. They look blindly beyond….The gaze between man and animal, which played a central role in the development of human society, has been extinguished and is gone”. (John Berger, 2015.)
Welcome to “Safari” – a visual and theoretical exploration of zoos around the world. Through this ongoing project, I seek to highlight the political and ethical questions surrounding these institutions. My aim is to publish a photo book by the end of 2025 that showcases zoos from different locations worldwide. The book will feature photographs that focus on the interactions between visitors and caged animals, capturing moments of real eye contact and showcasing the obscure architecture that separates them. Through these images, I hope to spark conversations and reflections on the reasons for the existence of zoos, their functionality, and the moral issues surrounding them.
https://yanirshani.com 