Photo: Love at First Sight, Palazinna Cinese, 2016. 48 x 60 inches. Edition of 5. © Karen Knorr
On Saturday, as April the Giraffe gave birth to a male giraffe at Animal Adventure Park in Harpursville, New York. An estimated 1.25 million people watched the miracle of life unfold on livestream, Tweeting up a storm, seemingly oblivious to the fact that this poor creature will be separated from April once he is weaned. Unable to live in the wild, the baby giraffe is destined to live his entire life in captivity and kept on display as fodder for the insatiable human appetite to consume the natural world.
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The birth comes at a time when the Giraffe Conservation Foundation has warned that the giraffe population has plummeted more than 40% over the past three decades, placing it on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s “Red List,” with the threat of extinction looming on the horizon.
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Giraffes are but one of the countless creatures being brought to the brink of death, whether hunted down by poachers or dealing with the tragic loss of natural habitats. At the same time, animals are continuously kidnapped and forced into captivity, forced to live in unnatural conditions until the day they die, their only purpose to serve as sources of “entertainment” for an unempathetic populace.
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The disjunction between nature and culture is so vast that people take pleasure and pride in casting animals in manmade scenarios taken to narcissistic heights. German photographer Karen Knorr understands this, and has created a body of work that both critiques this perversion, while simultaneously playing it up.
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