Charlotte
Dumas attended the Rietveld Academie of Amsterdam from 1996-2000 and later studied
as a resident at the Rijksacademy for visual Arts in Amsterdam from 2001-2002.
Dumas is an animal photographer, using her standard 80 mm lens on medium format
to reveal an up-close view of the complex relationship between her animal subjects
and her human viewers.
In all of her studies of animals, Charlotte Dumas
highlights the intricacies of the relationship between humans and their mammalian
animal counterparts, creating an intimate feeling between the viewer and her depictions
of horses and dogs while distancing the viewer from the more dangerous subjects
of the wolf and tiger. In each of her projects, Dumas inspires her viewers to
sympathize with the ever-caged animal, entrapped in a world dominated by the supreme
mammal-human.
In 2002, Dumas completed her first major project entitled
"Four Horses," in which she photographed four working police horses in Rotterdam.
This project served to inspire her next series of photographs in 2004, "Day is
Done," in which she photographed horses from the Carabinieri a cavallo in Rome.
Dumas returned to the subject of horses once again in 2006, photographing race
horses in Palermo in the series "Palermo 7."
In 2005, Charlotte Dumas
shifted her focus to the subject of wolves, travelling to Norway and Sweden to
create portraits of the majestic canines in her series "Reverie." Despite her
close proximity to the wolves in her photographs, Dumas reveals the vast distance
between the world of humans and wolves as her photographs portray the wolf as
an enigmatic, imperceptible being.
Dumas traveled to the United States
to create her series of tiger portraits entitled "Tiger, Tiger" in 2007, photographing
tigers within the confines of zoos, parks, and sanctuaries, in Indiana and Texas.
This project explores the dual role of the sanctuary as it restricts the animal
from its natural habitat as well as protects it from extinction. For the projects,
"Heart-Shaped Hole" (2008) and "Heart of a Dog" (2009), Dumas photographed stray
dogs in Palermo and New York City, shedding light on the plight of strays amidst
the chaos of the urban environment.
In 2011, Dumas set out to photograph fifteen
of the remaining search and rescue dogs deployed by FEMA to the World Trade Center
in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. Ten years after the terrorist
attacks Dumas located the dogs with the help of FEMA and photographed them in
their homes where they still live with their handlers across the United States.
The resulting series, "Retrieved" Dumas states, "These animals
were all at the same place at the same time, one decade ago for the same reason:
to work. That experience unites them, and was the incentive for me to pursue this
subject and to photograph the dogs. They now share the vulnerability of old age
while symbolizing a full decade coming to a close".
Dumas continues
her exploration of the service animal in her most recent series, Anima
by photographing the burial horses of the Arlington National Cemetery. These intensely
personal and up-close portraits of draft horses that serve the 3rd Infantry Regiment,
known as the Old Guard, reveal a powerful human connection to these honored animals.
Anima [view
images]
Retrieved 2011 [view
images]
Survey [view
images]
