24
B+W
COMMENT
Kevin Horan treats his animal subjects as if they were customers
in a small-town photo studio. It takes patience, but the result
is a unique set of portraits. He talks to Susan Burnstine.
AMERICAN CONNECTIONK
evin Horan’s new
book Goats and
Sheep: A Portrait
Farm (5 Continents
Editions, 2019) is a
delightful collection
of ungulate portraits, each of
which display unique human-
like qualities and personalities.
Horan treats his subjects as if
they were customers in a small-
town photo studio when creating
these portraits and the outcome
is nothing short of spectacular.
Some subjects provide smiles,
some command respect while
others touch a deep place within.
Following a successful 30-year
career as a photojournalist based
in Chicago, Horan and his wife
moved to Langley, Washington,
where he first became inspired
to photograph his neighbour’s
sheep. ‘They would come to thefence next to where we parked
and call us out,’ he says. ‘They
all had such different voices that
I realised they were individuals- even though I couldn’t have
distinguished them visually.
But that was the seed of the
idea: they would come into
the studio and sit for a formal
portrait. I’d provide a 5x7 they
could frame and hang on the
wall. It was a way to elevate
them to personhood.’
Horan’s initial plan went awry
after his subjects fled from
him as he attempted to take a
test shot, so he put the idea on
hold until the owner of a small
goat dairy agreed to let him
photograph her goats and sheep.
During the one-day shoot he
created three successful images
(Xantippe, Xenia, Lizzie) that
remain in the collection.
Horan did not consciously
set out to anthropomorphise
his subjects, but his intention
evolved as he continued to work
on the series. ‘I think at first I
just thought it would be kind of
funny: farm animals in portraits
with an Edwardian formality. I
soon realised that this process
wasn’t much different than
making all the thousands of
portraits of humans I had made.
Any portrait is a construction
completed by the viewer. We(the subject, the portraitist
and the viewer) use gesture to
create a person from a two-
dimensional image – even if it’s
a non-human person,’ he says.
‘It was fascinating to see how a
thrashing-about farm animal,
with not a whole lot of interest
in my enterprise, could become
a creature we might care
about – a creature with its own
thoughts and moods.’
To create these images, Horan
set up a cloth backdrop and four
to six strobe lights. Each set took
just over two hours to construct
on average. ‘Once I have the
light I want, it exists only in a
circle about one metre across,
or less. So then it’s a process of
persuading the subject to have
his or her head in that zone.
Sometimes that means over
and over and over,’ he says.susanburnstine.comMandy No. 1, 2015 Mr. Beasley No. 2, 2014‘h ey all had such diff erent voices that I
realised they were individuals – even though
I couldn’t have distinguished them visually.’