‘Revelatory and brutal’: HIDDEN memorialises animals in the anthropocene
Animals as entertainment. Tourists watch an Asian elephant forced to swim underwater for performances. Khao Kiew Zoo, Thailand, 2019. Adam Oswell / HIDDEN / We Animals
Jose Valle’s photograph in HIDDEN: Animals in the Anthropocene, captures an intolerable moment: dogs pressed against the walls of a slaughterhouse, some hiding their faces. In the foreground, a man, wiry and balding, loosely drags an iron bar across the floor. One dog gazes into the lens; exhausted, nothing left to give. The caption: “A butcher chooses the dog he will beat to death.” Every time I see the image, the same somatic distress arises; the desire to smash through time, space and page to pull the dogs to safety; to show them that a terrible error has occurred. It is a terrible, terrifying photograph.
Published in 2021, HIDDEN is a monumental document of humanity’s frankly savage relationship with other species. Co-edited by Jo-Anne McArthur, activist and founder of We Animals Media, its images are revelatory and brutal. Across 320 pages and 204 images, 40 dedicated photojournalists focus on the invisible animals in our lives: the animals whose skin lies alongside our skin, whose struggles we interpret as entertainment, whose bodies sit in our belllies; whose secretions swill in our hot drinks.
The idea of creating the book derived from McArthur’s interest in war photography. Volumes such as James Nachtwey’s legendary Inferno (1999) have delivered searing indictments of human atrocities. “Books matter because they memorialize topics that need staying power," reflected McArthur, during a trip to London. “And I decided that animals needed such a book.” Others agreed. The crowdfunder raised everything it needed in two days. For photojournalists like McArthur, it was a sign that this was a topic whose time had come.
In reviews, the word most often used to describe HIDDEN is ‘unflinching’ - a testament on the fortitude required of its contributors. Many are internationally recognised photographers who have travelled to the places where brutality has become routine “I can’t sit long with the book,” I confess to McArthur over tea. “Most people say that,” she replies, evenly. And yet, HIDDEN is spectacular; its colours rich and deep, each image immaculately framed; its subjects reverently offered. “The images that are so shocking that they’re hard to put out in the world - so they had better be engaging,” explains McArthur.
It’s almost impossible to encompass the scale of animal suffering today - precisely why most people don’t try. Between 80 to 100 billion, representing 60 percent of the world’s mammalian biomass, are killed for food every year. the vast majority after wretched lives in factory farms. Billions more used and discarded for entertainment, testing, in the illegal wildlife trade. HIDDEN itself is peppered with statistics but numbers are heady things. Figures such as “160 million: the global estimate of farmed animals transported to a slaughterhouse every day” only come to life when set alongside HIDDEN’s images. The scene inside a slaughterhouse truck after the cows have been unloaded - the floor sodden with shit and urine; another world, just visible through the vehicle’s oval windows - thrums with all its lost souls. This is storytelling at its most impactful.
Five years old this year, HIDDEN has sold over 3,700 copies and has won Photography Book of the Year at the Pictures of the Year International (2020) amongst others. Its images have been used by advocacy groups and exhibited in galleries, confirming animal photojournalism (APJ) as a vital genre that captures and exposes animals who would otherwise never get their story told, forcing transparency onto notoriously secretive industries that kill billions of animals every year.
“Their gaze is full of questions for us.” Across the confines of this crowded pen, a dairy cow locks eyes with the camera. Australia, 2017. Lissy Jayne / HIDDEN / We Animals
Central to the work is the idea of the gaze. In his 1970 pamphlet “Why Look at Animals?, critic John Berger posited that, when an animal looks back at a human, it disrupts the hierarchy of the observer and the observed. HIDDEN’s photographers get close and stay low, to challenge that hierachy and reflect the perspective of the animals. They focus on wide eyes and bewildered faces, bringing individuals to irrefutable life, even at the edge of death.
When an animal looks into the lens, like the dog in the slaughterhouse, “it means that they’re looking out at everyone who looks at the picture. That gaze is a confrontation, a question, requiring radical empathy and self-awaress,” McArthur once said. “Viewers must de-centre themselves and consider the world through the eyes of a different species, while holding the truth of humanity’s undeniable role in the story. When I meet animals in farms, their gaze is full of questions for us, but we don’t have a common language to communicate with them,” McArthur continues. “They can’t vocalise their questions, but their gaze does it. And we can’t discount that just because they are a different species.”
Louise Jorgensen photographed animals, both living and dead, in a Canadian slaughterhouse. “I want others to see what I see when I look into the eyes of an animal,” she once said. “To see that there is someone equal to you looking back from behind those frightened and pleading eyes. I capture emotion in eyes to understand that animals, like us, are emotional, sentient beings with the same capacity to feel joy, love, and to suffer immensely.”
The parallels with war photography continue to resonate. “Sometimes, when I say there's a war on animals, I am being provocative,” says McArthur. “I want people to think about what it is that I mean.” I know exactly what she means. Every day, my inbox offers new traumas: “rabbits scream as their hair is ripped out for angora”; “help traumatised dancing bears”; “cows are often skinned and dismembered while still conscious for leather”; “247,000 sharks killed every single day.” As I write, street dogs are being massacred in India and Morocco. In January, an elderly comunity dog in Florianopolis, Brazil was tortured to death by teenagers - for social media clicks. The seam of cruelty runs deep and it runs strong.
Animal photojournalists are fundamentally conflict photographers, says McArthur: “We go to a place of violence and document things the world needs to see.” The tolls are the same: post-traumatic stress is common, along with an additional burden, familiar to animal advocates, of being dismissed. Animal photojournalists confront humanity wth a reality it refuses to see; that can make them fair game. “I am in awe of these photographers …” writes seasoned fellow photographer Nick Brandt in the book. “They are … witness to a war that so many people have little idea exists, or choose to suppress that exists. It takes enormous inner strength and bloody-minded determination to illuminate the mass extermination that unfolds every second of every day across the planet.”
The machine churns on. A livestock export ship bound for the Middle East leaves a port with 60,000 animals on board. Australia, 2018. Gav Wheatley / HIDDEN / We Animals
Throughout HIDDEN’s pages lie a key provocation: our treatment of animals intersects with every other area of current human concern. The largest site of industrialised cruelty, animal agriculture, is now recognised as a key driver of climate change, of ecological disaster and species extinction, of indigenous land grabs and of global hunger; of societal breakdown and its inevitable targeting of the vulnerable. While the past five years have seen some progress - from the freefall of the fur industry and the burgeoning fields of animal law - the machine churns on. The current global lurch to rightwing politics has seen companies such as KFC and Nando’s abandoning their commitment to the Better Chicken Commitment. In the US, the USDA is currently proposing the elimination of slaughter line speed limits, placing animals and workers at terrible risk. Cruelty has become so much part of the system that, without it, the system wouldn’t exist. “Treating animals as units of production, wringing every last penny out of their bodies, adding just one more pregnancy to a [mother]; no wonder companies want [these activities] hidden,” McArthur says.
And the industry protects its own: a recent court ruling in Australia has handed copyright of Farm Transparency Project's undercover footage to the very slaughterhouse it exposed. Meanwhile, the UK Government has just ruled testing labs as national infrastructure, making protest against them an offence.
HIDDEN often portrays humans as co-victims. Who, after all, really wants to spend their days docking tails, force-feeding geese and pinning down rabbits in laboratories? When faces appear, they are blank, empty, focused on the job at hand. “At We Animals, we speak a lot about protecting workers. At the same time, we want readers to see that this is humanity,” says McArthur. “This is us. And we need to be able to look at ourselves.”
Her mood shifts however when speaking about activities such as fox hunting, rodeos and bullfighting. We talk quietly about the pre-fight injuries to the bull that include shaving his horns; starving him and goading him before releasing him into the ring to a wall of cheers. Some bulls are so frightened they try to escape. “Afterwards, they cut their ears off and parade around with the ears in their hands,” says McArthur, tightly. “How much brutality can we inflict before we flinch? And the aloneness of that animal; to die that way with no help coming.”
“I once met a child who was training to be a bullfighter,” she continues. “When we asked him why, he replied: ‘Because I love bulls …’. There needs to be more scrutiny.” It may be coming: three years ago, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child officially recognized that children must be protected from all forms of violence, including violence to animals. The argument: that it led to desensitization, decreased empathy, and potential perpetration of violence. If implemented, General Comment No. 26 (2023) could have an impact on every area of animal-focused entertainment and exploitation. And the young bullfighter might be given the opportunity to learn that love means care rather than killing.
In this context, animal photojournalism becomes a powerful form of activism because bringing these hidden truths to light “poses a fundamental threat to deeply embedded societal systems that continue, largely unchallenged,” says McArthur. “Our existence is intertwined, and the ethics of how we treat the other sentient beings with whom we share this planet are being called into question.” Seeking out these stories break through carefully constructed illusions that force people to participate in systems they would otherwise reject - and that in itself is an act of resistance. At five years old, the work of We Animals, of HIDDEN and of its photojournalists remains more necessary than ever.
