ARLES.- From scientific specimens and circus performers to beloved pets, endangered species and viral internet sensations, animals have occupied the photographic image almost from the moment the medium was invented. A major new exhibition, Modèle animal: 200 ans de photographie, brings together more than 500 photographs by 220 artists to examine how photography has shaped the way humans look at, live with, exploit and protect other species.

Co-produced by Photo Elysée and the Rencontres d’Arles, the exhibition is on view in Arles through October 4, 2026, before traveling to Photo Elysée in Lausanne, where it will run from December 4, 2026 to April 4, 2027.

Spanning two centuries, the show moves from some of photography’s earliest scientific applications to contemporary images circulating through social media. Rather than offering a conventional history of animal photography, curator Nathalie Herschdorfer and her team have organized the exhibition around different ways of looking — anatomical, performative, affective, fascinated, ethical, artistic and viral.

Together, these approaches reveal that photographs of animals rarely tell us only about animals. They also expose changing human attitudes toward nature, science, entertainment, companionship, power and environmental responsibility.

From scientific evidence to spectacle

In photography’s early decades, animals often appeared as subjects of scientific inquiry. The camera gradually replaced drawing as a tool for documenting, isolating and comparing natural forms. Microscopy, chronophotography and X-rays made it possible to examine the animal body with unprecedented precision.

Works in the exhibition trace this impulse from 19th-century microphotographs by Auguste Bertsch to the motion studies associated with photographers such as Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey. Enlarged details revealed structures invisible to the naked eye, making animals simultaneously more understandable and more strange.

Another section turns to the animal as performer.

Circuses, menageries, zoos and photographic studios transformed animals into spectacles, with the camera recording trained poses, learned behaviors and extraordinary feats. Yet the exhibition treats these images less as innocent entertainment than as evidence of the societies that produced them.

The photographs raise uncomfortable questions about what humans have historically demanded from animals and what those demands reveal about pleasure, control and assumptions of superiority.

Pieter Hugo’s 2007 portrait Abdullahi Mohammed with Mainasara, Ogere-Remo, Nigeria, showing a man alongside a hyena, is among the images that complicate familiar distinctions between companionship, performance and power.

Animals as family

The mood changes in the exhibition’s exploration of affection. Here animals become household members, companions and confidants.

From mid-century Kodachrome slides to Elliott Erwitt’s celebrated street photographs, these pictures capture the everyday intimacy that develops between people and animals. Friendship, loyalty and even physical resemblance become recurring themes.

The exhibition includes photographers whose images have helped define this emotional territory, among them Erwitt, Martin Parr, Rinko Kawauchi and William Wegman.





Kawauchi’s quiet observations stand in sharp contrast to Wegman’s carefully staged photographs, yet both demonstrate how deeply animals have entered human visual culture.

The exhibition’s argument is that such pictures do more than document affection. They also shape it, providing some of the images through which people understand ideas of companionship, loyalty and care.

When the camera becomes a witness

The relationship becomes more difficult in the exhibition’s ethical section.

Beginning with the rise of animal-rights and environmental movements in the late 1960s, photography increasingly became a tool of investigation and protest. Images of factory farming, slaughterhouses, laboratories, captivity, trafficking and species loss transformed the camera into both witness and evidence.

The exhibition asks where documentation ends and exploitation begins. How much suffering should a photographer show in order to provoke awareness without turning pain itself into spectacle?

Alongside images of abuse and disappearance are works concerned with repair, care and alternative forms of coexistence — a shift that reflects growing anxiety about humanity’s relationship with other species in the Anthropocene.

From surrealism to the age of the animal meme

Animals have also offered photographers a way to escape straightforward representation.

Wanda Wulz’s famous 1932 experiment merging her own face with that of a cat appears in a section devoted to transformation, montage and fiction. Later photographers including Karen Knorr and Vasantha Yogananthan similarly use animals to blur distinctions between reality, mythology and invention.

Other artists in the sprawling survey include Richard Avedon, Peter Beard, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Doisneau, Masahisa Fukase, Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, Kati Horna, Daido Moriyama, Sebastião Salgado, Sarah Moon, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Sophie Calle, Roger Ballen and Jochen Lempert.

The exhibition ultimately arrives at the internet, where animal imagery has achieved an unprecedented scale.

Cute cats, dogs, exotic creatures and invented digital species compete for attention in algorithm-driven feeds. The phenomenon may seem uniquely contemporary, but Modèle animal argues that the internet did not invent humanity’s obsession with animal pictures. It merely made that obsession globally visible.

The show’s cover image makes the point memorably: Masahisa Fukase’s Cap Erimo from his celebrated 1976 Ravens series transforms a bird into an almost monumental silhouette, at once recognizable and mysterious.

By bringing historical photographs, anonymous images and contemporary experiments together, Modèle animal proposes that the history of animal photography is also a history of ourselves — of what humans have chosen to study, admire, possess, fear, manipulate and protect.

The exhibition is curated by Nathalie Herschdorfer, director of Photo Elysée, with Vincent Lavoie as scientific advisor and a curatorial committee comprising Fanny Brülhart, Cécile Nédélec and Manuel Sigrist, assisted by Sarah Bourget and Emma Hennegrave. A publication accompanying the exhibition, Modèle animal. 200 ans de photographie, is published by Éditions Textuel.