Come and “meet” a menagerie of our furry, finned, and feathered friends depicted across more than 100 photographs and archival objects from the Center for Creative Photography’s collection.
“Animality: 100 Years of Photographs” features a wide range of photographic formats, a diverse group of photographers, and all manner of animals across a century of time. The exhibition is free and open to the public. Visitors are invited to explore and discover the ways photographs reveal aspects of the many kinds of relationships between humans and animals.
Animality was created in collaboration with seven University of Arizona honors students—Dylan Brown, Maya Cervantes, Emma Charles, Charles Elliott, Emily Hogg, Emma Mireles, and Shay Parchem—who participated in professors Netzin and Dieter Steklis’s Fall 2025 course, Human and Animal Interrelationships. The interdisciplinary exhibition is organized around 11 thematic groupings, which together address human-animal interactions, human and animal expressions, and animal welfare.
A second cohort of honors students — Derek Dewyer, Riley Weltmann, Lucy Waddell, Ariana Laguna-Garcia and Karsten Yin — contributed selections that will be shared virtually in the gallery.
More ways to look
Visitors can submit their own animal photographs for “Animals Everywhere,” a rotating community showcase displayed on a monitor just outside the gallery.
A full slate of programming accompanies the exhibition:
- SNAP (Social Night of Art and Photography) — Sept. 3, 5-7p, featuring a conversation with Senf and professors H. Dieter Steklis and Netzin Steklis from the School of Animal & Comparative Biomedical Sciences
- Community Day — Oct. 10, 10a-4p, including a lecture by Pryor Dodge, author of “YLLA, The Birth of Modern Animal Photography”
- Artist Talk — Nov. 6, 5:30-6:30p, Chicago-based with photographer and interdisciplinary artist Colleen Plumb
- Book Club Discussion with Colleen Plumb — Nov. 7, 11a-noon
A century of photographers
The exhibition’s subtitle, “100 Years of Photographs,” reflects the range of its holdings: the earliest image dates to the late 19th century, and the most recent from within the last decade. Photojournalism, fine-art photography, social documentary and early 20th-century pictorialism all appear side by side.
Some of the photographers in “Animality” are among the most significant figures in 20th-century American photography, including Garry Winogrand, whose restless street photography helped define the era, and W. Eugene Smith, whose photo essays for Life magazine essentially invented the modern documentary photo essay. Andreas Feininger and Louise Dahl-Wolfe, both widely influential in their respective specialties of technical instruction and fashion photography, are also represented, alongside John Gutmann and Rosalind Fox Solomon. “Some of these photographers are known for their animal pictures,” Senf said. “Some, like Ansel Adams, took some pictures of animals because he took a lot of pictures, but he never set out to make pictures of animals in particular.”
One defining animal photographer
One photographer gets her own mini exhibit within the exhibition. A dedicated section is devoted to Ylla (Camilla Koffler, 1911-1955), whom Senf calls the defining animal photographer of her era — a Vienna-born artist who fled Nazi-occupied France for New York and built an international career photographing animals for magazines, advertisements and her own books, including several with “Goodnight Moon” author Margaret Wise Brown. Ylla’s archive is held by CCP, and the exhibition presents a slideshow of 100 of her photographs alongside portraits, correspondence, magazine tear sheets and other material from her career.
