So the summer has come to an end, rain hits the window of my office and as I idle away a few minutes I find a series of images by Kevin Horan of goats. As I said in the title I am a goat, in Chinese Year Of, so I was intrigued, who would have thought goats could be such interesting and varied subjects?
‘This is a work about portraiture,’ says Kevin Horan, who is based in Langley, Washington. ‘What it does and how it works. I’ve made portraits of people for years and the chemistry of it is still mysterious. I tell my subjects that a good portrait is a collaboration between photographer and subject. But how do you collaborate with a goat? A goat you’ve just met?’
Bella
Lily #4 ‘They’re treated as if they were customers in a small-town photo studio’
Jake #1 ‘While the idea was to bring farm animals into a classical portrait studio, the studio actually goes to them – it takes a couple of hours to set up lighting and backdrops’
Ben ‘My first subjects were the sheep across the lane from me. But that didn’t work out. I then went to a small goat dairy, and a couple of goat fanciers, who were more cooperative’
Kevin Horan is an artist based in Langley, Washington, USA. He is working on projects which look at animals as people, people as animals, and the planet as a very small place. His pictures are reality-based, and he enjoys finding the amazing revealed in the ordinary. His work from Chattel was selected for the Photolucida Critical Mass Top 50 in 2014.
You can see more of his work which includes pigs here Kevin Horan
Oxford School of Photography 