Amelia is fourteen years old. In many ways, she is your average American teenager: since she was three years old, she has been her mother’s muse and the subject of her photographs. However, not every mom is a world-class photographer with a predilection for photographing animals. And it’s not every teenager who has portraits of herself with elephants, llamas, ponies, tigers, kangaroos, chimpanzees, and endless dogs, cats, and other animals—portraits that hang in the collections of major art museums around the world. Amelia and the Animals is Robin Schwartz’s second monograph featuring this collaborative photographic series dedicated to documenting her and Amelia’s adventures among the animals. As Schwartz puts it, “Photography is a means for Amelia to meet animals. Until recently, she took these opportunities for granted. She didn’t realize how unusual her encounters were until everyone started to tell her how lucky she was to meet so many animals.” Nonetheless, these images are more than documents of Amelia and her rapport with animals; they offer a meditation on the nature of interspecies communication and serve as evidence of a shared motherdaughter journey into invented worlds, of fables they enact together. Schwartz concludes, “Photography gives us the opportunity to access our dreams, to discover the extraordinary.”
