158THE END OF THE DAYDREAMthe animal head 180 degrees away from the viewer. This operation is de-
signed to subvert anthropocentrism and to simultaneously inscribe anthro-
pomorphism—here Horn presents us with another set of apparent con-
tradictions. Posed against the similar off-white backdrop used in Dead
Owl, these bird heads formally transcend the presence of the animal-trace
to elusively lean toward a form suspended between realism and abstrac-
tion. Horn’s diptych strategy is also employed. But in this case we no longer
stand in front of the photographed object—we stand behind it. Or do we?
The inversion of the subject operated by Horn makes us instantly aware
of the inherent anthropocentrism that governs our outlook on animals—
the necessity to paradoxically prioritize the vis-à-vis, even when we ac-
knowledge that the animals can’t really stare back.
The turning away of Horn’s bird portraiture is designed to hinder the
affirmative taxonomical ordering of natural history through the conceal-
ment of eyes and beaks. What is the scientific value of these images? Do
they hint at the impossibility of accessing animals beyond their body sur-
faces? The composition recalls the painterly genre of the portrait, but
what type of animal portrait are they? Is Horn inviting us to partake in a
taxonomical comparison of animal morphology? If so, to what end?
Prolonged observation of some of the bird heads unavoidably results
in the surfacing of placeholders for eyes and beaks upon the feathery
lumps. This uncanny phenomenology, called pareidolia, reveals how
hardwired our perceptual visual tropes are, such that the mere summoning
of the stylistic coordinates of the portrait genre enables anthropomorphic
responses to emerge on the back of the bird’s head. During the nineteenth
century, photographic portraits actively partook in the process of iden-
tity formation through an appropriation of the aesthetic paradigms of
portrait painting. But identity, in these photographs, is not fixed by the
eyes and the mouths— it becomes dispersed in the repetitive minutiae of
the plumage patterning that distinguishes each couple of birds from the
next, and the viewer is required to work harder to develop a heightened
register of observative immersion with the images. Levinas’s paradigm of
the impossibility of an “animal face” inevitably comes to mind. To Levi-
nas, the face becomes the threshold through which ethical obligation is
established among beings, and the unknowability of the other is the one
element that continuously calls for a furthering of the relational. But do
birds have faces in a Levinian sense? Even if we were to see the faces of