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Modèle animal is a two-century survey of animal photography that asks how images shape the ways people observe, love, use, admire and defend animals. Organized by Les Rencontres d’Arles, the exhibition is scheduled at Photo Élysée in Lausanne, Switzerland, from 4 December 2026 to 4 April 2027.
What the exhibition is about
Modèle animal treats animal photography as more than wildlife pictures. Its subject is the changing relationship between humans and animals, seen through photographs that classify, stage, cherish, celebrate, exploit and reinterpret animal life. The organizers describe a two-century passage through images showing how photography has influenced both how people look at animals and how they treat them.
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The exhibition’s seven approaches offer a useful way to understand that breadth. They are not rankings or mutually exclusive categories: a single image may invite more than one kind of reading.
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- Anatomical: images used to observe, analyze or classify animals, including Auguste Bertsch’s microphotographs.
- Performative: animals presented in staged scenes or feats, including William Wegman’s constructed images.
- Affective: photographs of domestic animals as companions, a perspective also reflected in images by Martin Parr and Elliott Erwitt.
- Fascinated: work that dwells on animal beauty and the appeal of the animal world. Rinko Kawauchi’s observations and Simona Kossak’s search for harmony are among the examples cited by the organizers.
- Ethical: photographs that make exploitation visible and may prompt viewers to question it.
- Plastic: visual experimentation that draws on animal forms and ways of seeing.
- Viral: images diverted and recirculated online, where repetition and manipulation can make fiction and reality harder to distinguish.
From pet portraits to animals as symbols
Animal photographs can make a familiar pet feel individual and close, or turn an animal into a sign of something larger. That range is part of the exhibition’s central idea: the subject is not only what an animal looks like, but also what the person behind the camera—and the viewer—asks it to mean.
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Amateur Photographer’s account of the exhibition discusses street portraits by Elliott Erwitt and Martin Parr, and Rinko Kawauchi’s attention to native Japanese fauna such as deer. It also points to Masahisa Fukase’s Solitude of Ravens and Jean-Baptiste Huynh’s portrait Buckley (1999), examples that suggest how an animal image can carry emotional or symbolic weight beyond straightforward documentation.
Observation, spectacle and ethical attention
Photography can make animals objects of study: close observation and microphotography bring details into view, while classification places animals within systems devised by people. It can also make them performers, shaped by staging or by expectations of spectacle. These modes raise different questions about control, attention and the animal’s role in the image.
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The exhibition also includes work that confronts the human use of animals. Amateur Photographer discusses Pieter Hugo’s portraits of Nigeria’s “Hyena Men” in this context. Such images can draw attention to relationships that are complicated by power and exploitation, rather than allowing the viewer to treat an animal as scenery or spectacle alone.
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The historical range begins in the nineteenth century and extends to contemporary image-making. Amateur Photographer reports that a photograph of a cow made by Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey in 1842 is believed to be the first photograph of a living animal; that is a reported claim, not an uncontested historical fact.
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The article also places the exhibition’s subject alongside figures including William Henry Fox Talbot, Eadweard Muybridge, Henri Cartier-Bresson, David Bailey and Sebastião Salgado. The organizers’ examples reach into contemporary practice with work by Augustin Rebetez, Robin Lopvet and Vasantha Yogananthan. Together, these references point to a history in which animals have been subjects of technical experiment, documentary observation, artistic construction and circulation.
Where and when to see Modèle animal
The confirmed upcoming presentation is at Photo Élysée in Lausanne, Switzerland, from 4 December 2026 to 4 April 2027. An earlier presentation at Les Rencontres d’Arles concluded on 4 October 2026; its schedule and ticket details are no longer current.
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The exhibition book
The official bookstore lists an associated French-language illustrated book, Modèle animal, 200 ans de photographie, by Nathalie Herschdorfer, Vincent Lavoie, Emanuele Coccia and Manuel Sigrist, published by Textuel on 1 July 2026. The listing specifies 288 pages and ISBN 9782386291715. It describes the book as containing 250 images; that figure belongs to the book, not to the exhibition. The French listing gives a price of €55, which may change.
The exhibition and book counts are different: Amateur Photographer describes the exhibition as comprising more than 500 photographs by 220 artists, while the official bookstore lists 250 images in the book. The book listing is in French; an English edition is not established by that listing.
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