Ostrich Portraits
The idea for this series stemmed from concurrent work on the subject of roadkill, where I explore the idea of people casually passing dead animals on the road.
Must one see an animal as an individual in order to care?
My plan was to create twelve portraits of ostrich to emphasize their unique individual character. Cornellskop is a working animal farm north of Cape Town owned and operated by a veteran of the animal representation industry, Luke Cornell. It is easily among the top five ethical sanctuaries out of the more than one hundred that I have visited across North America and Africa. I set up a plein-air studio near to the pasture that housed the ostrich. Luke opened the gate and the ostrich came toward him. It was a good start that quickly deteriorated.
The ostrich wanted nothing to do with me.
More workers arrived. We made a makeshift corral and one by one the ostrich were funnelled into the chute to be deposited in front of me and my camera. The pinnacle of horrors came with the last ostrich called, Jesus. A sack had to be placed over his head to “calm him down.” From the moment he was un-bagged, Jesus wanted to get away with a special vigour. Feathers flew and, within seconds, he crashed through the fencing and was grazing once again with with Bella and Mäkovél-- just a stone’s throw from where only moments before all Hell had broken loose. The shoot was over.
