We have a disturbing relationship with animals, perhaps founded in the idea that we are not one of them. As humans, we enjoy creating hierarchies where there may be none, consistently creating artificial tests of intelligence that elevate us above the animal kingdom. Does anyone think it strange that we would suggest a hypothesis like “A dog has the IQ of a three year old child”? What does that really prove except mankind is arrogant to a fault?

By presenting and reinforcing false walls between ourselves and the natural world, we forever doom ourselves to an arrogance born of ignorance, one that does more harm than good for both ourselves and all those inhabiting the planet today. We live at a time when we have altered the environment in such a powerful way that it is not just mankind who suffers from our hubris. Animals are the creatures Nature put forth to create balance in the cycle of life. Yet we have upset this balance in a myriad of disturbing ways.

Colleen Plumb’s new monograph, Animals Are Outside Today (Radius) is a powerful look at the way in which we have fetishized, capitalized, ostracized, appropriated, incarcerated, ignored, and observed the Others of the animal world in which we live. As Lisa Hostetler writes in the introduction, “Plumb’s photographs are not those of an animal-rights activist, wildlife photographer, or social documentarian…. If art is a form of philosophy, Animals Are Outside Today is less a manifesto and more a thought poem.”

Indeed, taken individually or as a group, Plumb’s photographs are a meditation on the way in which we have so consumed animals that, if not for her questioning eye, we might not notice at all. Most provocatively, the way in which animals have become a source of food is a questionable subject, for we know now full well that the cause of so many degenerative diseases is their regular consumption. Yet we choose to ignore this, placing pleasure over respect for both bodies—theirs and ours. Plumb’s image of the pigs hanging from meat hooks is incredibly powerful, perhaps because they look more like corpses than anything else. In a later image one such carcass is roasted up for the enjoyment of a group at the barbecue.

Another way in which our relationship appears as questionable is in the images taken at zoos, the cruelest prisons on earth. As animals are not afforded the same rights to which we give our prisoners, which is to say, no inhumane treatment, they are kept in false environments forever on public display. Do we think animals are unaware of their captivity and the way in which they are being treated as circus freaks for our amusement? Maybe the polar bear in Central Park has limited intelligence on the human scale, but it seems highly likely that it understands who the real fools are.

In that same way we may wish to consider house pets, animals confined to our domestic arrangements. Plumb includes an image of four birds in a cage hung beside a clothes dryer, creating an image of nightmarish possibility. The birds, no longer able to fly, must now also contend with living beside a monstrous machine that reinforces a lack of concern about their welfare.

On the other side of this equation are the images of animals appropriated into our visual landscape. From posters and paintings to rugs and sculptures, from museum fossils and taxidermied examples to feather hats and lawn flamingos, Plumb offers a gentle look at the way in which we have appropriated animals into our landscape, making them objects of contemplation, enjoyment, and mystical beings. No longer are animals real. They are symbolic, standing for what we want them to mean rather than what we are. Compare the photograph of the sculpture of an elephant to the photograph of the elephant working in the circus tent—which one has it better? Perhaps the one that never lived.

Lastly, Plumb provides us with the most distressing of all images: the animals who have died free and independent. Their decomposing bodies, shot at the site of their death, are humbling images of the way in which life is never ever sentimental. Taken as a whole, this best represents the lack of romanticism of these images, yet something sacred remains, powerful and emotional, in each of these pictures. In Animals Are Outside Today, Plumb's images suggest that we question our assumptions and our position out of respect to all creatures on earth.

Sara Rosen