Unmet Friend No. 1537
Serial No. 1537
2006

Unmet Friends

The ability of human beings to communicate, reason, create and use technology, makes it easy to convince ourselves that we are fundamentally different from other species. But evidence suggests we differ from animals only in the scope of these capacities, not in their intrinsic nature. Emotion is another characteristic that can be added to this list.

Until the publication of Charles Darwin’s "The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals" (1872), it was a tenet of western science that the experience of emotion was unique to humans. Animal behavior has not changed since then, but the scientific consensus has: human emotions clearly have their antecedents in many other species.

The faces in Unmet Friends are those of live animals including mammals, reptiles, amphibia and fish. When confronted with a face that appears to display a recognizable emotional expression, an anthropomorphic interpretation is difficult to avoid.

Our understanding of another creature, human or otherwise, is inescapably biased, first by our underlying human nature, and then by our individual perceptions: we see what we want to see. Although an animal’s facial expression is easily observed, its meaning is necessarily uncertain. Unmet Friends invites us to question human faces too.

[Note: This series is not yet available for sale.]