Amelia & the Animals

Amelia is 14 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 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 mother-daughter journey into invented worlds.
Robin Schwartz (born 1957) earned an MFA in photography from Pratt Institute, and her photographs are held in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Museum of Modern Art, in New York; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Brooklyn Museum; Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia; Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris; and Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany. She is an assistant professor of photography at William Paterson University and lives in New Jersey with her husband, Robert Forman, daughter, Amelia, and five companion animals.