My Little Zoo

Grzegorz Dąbrowski

My Little Zoo, 2009, 20 colour photographs, 30 × 45.6 cm

Collection II of the Arsenal Gallery in Białystok. Work purchased by the Arsenal Gallery in 2010

Grzegorz Dąbrowski’s photographs belong to his long-running, chronologically and geographically open series My Little Zoo. The photographs spring from the experience of an alert observer with the keen eye of a press photographer, who sees things that most passers-by fail to notice. The link to series is provided by images of animals. Some might find a place in the archives of a forensic laboratory; others are shown in striking frames, as if straight from National Geographic. Dąbrowski was inspired to think of the photographs in terms of a collection by Arnold Odermatt’s Karambolage series. The Swiss police photographer’s consistency and unmistakable passion for photography shines through in Dąbrowski’s photographic series.

The little zoo embraces a variety of animals, recorded in surprising shots: a worn-out teddy bear in a dustbin; an eagle without a crown in the emblem of the People’s Republic of Poland; birds in flight captured from below – possibly taxidermic exhibits; a stray dog; a piece of a model bison advertising a popular brand of beer; a fur stole with a fox head around a woman’s neck; the carcass of a bird in a puddle; close-up shots of a goat, a weasel and a male roe deer. Some of the photographs were taken at the Akcent zoo in Białystok; one of those shows a plaque attached to a tree bearing information on red deer, another is an image of a donkey captured against the background of a green shed it shares with a peacock. The menagerie is completed by a blue horse painted on the wall and a silhouette screen-shot of a giraffe.

The seemingly unconnected set of photographs creates a web of images woven from unavoidable associations with death, the repulsive strangeness and incongruity of the captured situation. It is hard to escape the feeling that these scenes are viewed through a keyhole. Some of them evoke associations with nineteenth-century showcases of stuffed animals, others fit into the convention of magical realism. Taken as a whole, they are a contemporary version of the early modern cabinet of curiosities, a collection of natural and man-made objects which, when viewed by an observer equipped with the tools to read the meanings they contain, provide access to that which is beyond the material world. My Little Zoo is a peculiar Noah’s Ark, a surviving collection of curiosity animals. What Dąbrowski extracts from reality are things that do not correspond to their surroundings, that have escaped the normative filter of rationalism.

Izabela Kopania

translated from Polish by Klaudyna Michałowicz