Trophies of the Hunt, at the Cleveland Museum of Art, is an exhibition that will immediately make your stomach turn at the barbaric photographic display of the power and dominance humans extend over nature. After leaving the gallery in complete disgust, a second look proved to be easier to handle. By far, the stand out Still life photograph of the exhibition, composed by Eikoh Hosoe, 1960, is a stylized black and white photo of a female figure holding a dead , white fish comments on the status of female/male relationships with the use of light and dark along with proportions and specific camera angles, making the piece visually appealing in place of the majority of the pieces' appalling effect. Composition dates on the works range from the middle nineteenth century to as recently as 1995, but despite the vast time span, the animal manipulation is barely redeemed by threaded descriptions woven through the collection: “insanity of life,” or “finding beauty in the grotesque,” in which hunters are turned into hunted. Joel-Peter Witkin’s Feast of Fools representing the “deepest and ugliest aspects of human nature” through the display of fruits and vegetables along with dismembered hands, feet and an autopsied corpse of an infant proved to be the most insane piece in the show.

My initial reaction to the exhibition was one of disgust, accompanied with feelings of cruelty, barbarity, human domination, and even a “Western” feeling. All of those feelings are justifiable, given the visuals of the exhibit. The pieces offered more insight into the collection: subject matter for the photographs are orchestrated when the artist actually, physically, manipulated or capture the animal so that the photograph can be taken when needed. From that point, the photo then becomes the animal and is continuously dominated and handled in the exact same manner as the animal. First being shipped around, written about and “interpreted” by the curator, and then displayed on the walls of the gallery in the exact same way that the animals are hunted and hung (as shown by Captain N. Bailey in his 1870 photo Two Partridges Hanging. The photo is then taken from its natural environment, described as a symbol for what ever need be (a male, a female, a relationship) which then transforms the curator into the hunter. Trophies of the Hunt is tolerable only because of the curators’ descriptions and interpretations of the photos as symbols and representations of relationships, grotesque beauty, and the ever-present struggle with human dominance. from Cool Cleveland contributor DJ Hellerman DJ_Hellerman@yahoo.com (:divend:)