Creatures

Henry Horenstein, who teaches photography at the Rhode Island School of Design and who has authored books on everything from color theory to horse-racing, offers us a wordless 80-page portfolio that will simply take your breath away. These are black and white "portraits of all manner of living things, made in zoos, aquaria and in the wild, shot on Agfa's wonderfully lush Scala black and white slide film, then translated into equally lush Ilfochrome, or on occasion, platinum prints. These, in turn, were printed in tritone to maintain the wide range of tone in the originals. You never have seen creatures portrayed like this, or in such wonderful juxtaposition: the graceful feathers of a flamingo in close-up on the left; a seemingly identical image on the right--only it is an overhead view of a school of carp. If Horenstein had relied only on closeups of hides or feathers, or on tortured abstracts, I would not be so ecstatic about this work. But he manages to capture the "animalness" of each creature while bringing a fresh perspective to it. Only the wildlife photographs of Frans Lanting have affected me as much. --Frank Van Riper, photography columnist, the Washington Post