Norfleet, Barbara: Manscape With Beasts, Photographs by Barbara Norfleet

Harry N Abrams Inc

1990

First Edition

Antic, frantic and frighteningly incongruous, the photographs in Norfleet's first book are bound to unnerve the reader. Curator of photography at Harvard's department of visual and environmental studies, she puts animals into uncomfortably human contexts: a grimacing raccoon capers by a frozen pond, his natural playground strewn with discarded vials of pills. It is not only the images but Norfleet's eerie, contrasting extremes of light and color that are responsible for the strange compulsion--and the wit--of her pictures, as when a spotlit rat appears to play house with four dolls in the middle of a marsh. Is humanity doomed here to a rat's life, or does nature stand corrupted by civilization's wiles? One of the photographer's virtues is her decision to raise questions but answer none. Behind the intense clarity of her surfaces lurks Norfleet's fatalism--or, as she puts it in her introduction, "You see the point. I respect animals. I was raised to believe that life would always get better, but I've lost that certainty."