Views of Paradise: A Photographic Atlas of the Artificial Environments of Zoological Gardens and Aquariums in Oceania

Abstract

“Why photograph zoos?” is the question that guides the project Views of Paradise, a photographic atlas of artificial environments from 82 zoos and aquariums in Australia, Fiji, New Caledonia, New Zealand and Papua New Guinea. In Views of Paradise, the analyses of the resulting images identify aspects of landscape representations in zoos in relation to natural and cultural environments, situating zoos within the conceptual spaces of paradise, utopia, dystopia and heterotopia. Because people have a predisposition to only seeing animals, making them blind to the apparatus of the zoo, this research uses the absence of animals in the images as a method to shift the focus of vision away from animals and in the direction of their hybrid and lifeless living environments. Zoos occupy an ambiguous position in society, being perceived as places of imprisonment and protection. From menageries, meant to entertain the human curiosity, they are changing into institutions committed to conservation, research and education. Still, zoos reflect our need to care for the environment against our inability to re-create an environment as perfect as that found in nature, or to preserve it in the wild. The atlas highlights the importance of photography as a research method for the systematic collection of visual information and production of a criticism that is not only directed at zoos, but to humanity, for environmental practices that disregard the rights of non-humans. Its artistic visions of zoos and nature, utopian or dystopian, depending from which angle the absence of the animal is understood, are born from the transformative effect of photography on perception: by photographing zoo spaces and objects without the animals, they are transformed from insignificant artifices to subjects worth of inquiry, to signal the possibility of a meaningful existence for the empty zoo, either as image or as an actual site.