Browsing through a selection of past and present photographic works in the humanist tradition, it seemed to me that representations of dogs came up with unexpected frequency - not the family pets or elegant show canines Elliot Erwitt had so much fun with, but rather those animals living in their own world, which are encountered just about anywhere outside a few northern hemisphere cities.

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In the last ten or twelve years, it is no longer fashionable to accuse animal lovers of lavishing their affections on child substitutes, while the famous photos of Hitler playing with his dog in Berchtesgaden are no longer seen as off-putting. It seems that during his Brazilian retirement, Strangl, one-time commandant of Treblinka concentration camp, is said to have been struck while gazing at cattle in a slaughterhouse pen by "these enormous eyes which look at me without knowing that in a moment, they will die".

The common unity of all living beings has been emphasised by many philosophers, beginning with Plato who in the Politikos pointed out that if a distinction is made between humanity on the one hand and all other living beings on the other, a similar distinction may come to be applied to humanity itself. For his part, rather than risk unjustly denying them their just share of humanity, Rousseau preferred to think of the great African apes described in travel narratives as distant cousins, - a position which seems to me fairly close to the instinctive philosophy of those photographers who are passionate but cautious observers of life.

One can just as easily encounter among the work of most humanists past and present the image of a solitary tree. The work of Marc Trivier from the eighties, combining sequences of trees, slaughterhouse scenes and portraits of lunatics and of celebrities from the world of the arts and philosophy with whom he was in correspondence, probably represents the most radical example of this approach. Among his correspondents was Gilles Deleuze, who had long been concerned with the limits of animality. This perception of the animal takes us back to before what Levi-Strauss called "the hellish cycle" begun by Descartes, whom we must hold responsible for the definitive distinction between human and animal, a distinction which "serves to separate man from men and to claim, to the benefit of ever more restricted minorities, the privilege of a humanity no sooner born than corrupted through having borrowed its principles and meaning from self-esteem". The logical culmination of this cycle leads, inevitably, to the zoological garden¹.

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Eric Auzoux*

*Excerpted from My Brother's Image, Photosynkyria 2002, Thessaloniki Museum of photography. Thessaloniki 2002.

1. Levi-Strauss, Antropologie Structurale, Deux, p.53. Foucault has demonstrated the parallel evolution of zoos, lunatic asylums and penitentiaries.