This series of thirty staged narrative portraits, Animal Project, was created between 2002 and 2006 as Karady traveled around the U.S. to engage with people whose lives are emotionally, financially, or culturally intertwined with animals. During this time, she developed an artistic methodology related to the one she practices today. She went into communities surrounding artist residencies, interviewed people with interesting stories and relationships with their animals and then staged photographs in collaboration with them that visually interpreted their stories.

Animal Project explores the increasingly complex and often conflicted role that animals play in human lives. Each large-scale color photograph represents a charged moment that gives the viewer insight into the subjects’ relationships to theiranimals and to each other, as well as the subjects’ backgrounds, interests, personalities, etc. Stories range from overindulged pets in the urban and suburban home to the role of “wild” and farm animals in rural environments. One prevalent theme involves “the schizoid quality to our relationship with animals, in which sentiment and brutality exist side by side.”

Influenced by anthropology, her investigation began in New York in 2002, focusing on the increasingly important role of urban pets in the modern and alternative family structure. Pets are displacing both human offspring and spouses and these staged photographs reflect how deeply invested these human-animal relationships often are. Our standards for the treatment of animals are dramatically shifting: some images address the heroic lengths that humans go to for their beloved creatures or the emotional toll experienced at the loss of a pet. Other photographs examine people who collect unusual or exotic animals because their choice of pet reflects their own unique sensibility or aesthetic taste. Yet others explore ritualistic interactions between humans and working, domesticated, farm, and “wild” animals that are part of the fabric of a broader American culture.

Influenced by the drama, color and light found in tableaux painting, this work folds real stories, people and truths into staged and allegorical scenarios. Throughout the history of photography, the binary poles of documentary photography and fine art photography were most often considered at odds with each other. Karady indulges this tension between authenticity and fabrication by staging scenarios that reflect something real about the subjects. The weight of implied narrative asks that each photograph be read like a text; it is loaded with symbolic objects and gestures, psychologically charged space, and references to subjects outside itself (e.g. art history, Bible, contemporary media).
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1 Pollan, Michael. “An Animal Place.” The New York Times. November 10, 2002.