A few years ago Robin Shwartz visited Mikayla, the founder of Save a Fox, an animal sanctuary in Minnesota, where fur farm rejects and exotic pet cast-offs find a new home.
These animals weren’t born in the wild and for this reason they cannot be released because they don’t have the skills to survive in the wild.
Photo by © Robin Schwartz
Known for her portraits exploring interspecies relationships, she often presents her daughter, Amelia, posed with a wide variety of animals, from reindeer to kangaroos. Being an only child and having an only child has led to a “strong fantasy world” informing her life and work. She has described her pictures as “evidence of the invented worlds we explore and the fables we enact.”
She is a 2016 Guggenheim Fellow in photography with photographs in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Museum of Modern Art; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, San Francisco Museum of Art; The Brooklyn Museum and the Bibliothéque Nationale, France, National Museum of Photography, Film and Television, England; and The Museum Folkwang, Germany, among others.
Her work has received several recognitions and has been published in books, magazines, and newspapers such as the New York Times Magazine, Time Magazine LIGHTBOX, The New Yorker, Oprah, NPR, Fader, Slate, Stern, Telegraph UK, and Guardian UK, among others.
Schwartz is a professor in photography at William Paterson University of New Jersey and has taught at The International Center for Photography, New York City.
Lodi