Behind the Scenes of Amelia and the Animals

Since Amelia was 3 years old, she has been her mother’s muse and the subject of her photographs. Her mother, the photographer Robin Schwartz, has been working for twelve years on this ongoing collaborative series, dedicated to documenting her and Amelia’s adventures among the animals. As Amelia has gotten older, she’s become a more active participant. Amelia and the Animals is Robin Schwartz’s second monograph featuring this collaborative photographic series dedicated to documenting her and Amelia’s adventures among the animals. As Schwartz puts it, “Photography is a means for Amelia to meet animals. Until recently, she took these opportunities for granted. She didn’t realize how unusual her encounters were until everyone started to tell her how lucky she was to meet so many animals.” Amelia now contributes ideas for their shoots, and the images have become more experimental through their mother-daughter collaboration. The resulting photographs are more than documents of Amelia and her rapport with animals. They offer a meditation on the nature of interspecies communication and serve as evidence of a shared mother-daughter journey into invented worlds, of fables they enact together.