The Lives of Others

It looks a little lost there, the kangaroo, sitting in the middle of the room between tea trolley and sideboard, ears peeked, 
facing something outside the viewers field of vision. Or the squirrel, similarly isolated between the rainy worlds of a suburban 
fence and a few garbage bags and old boards strewn among puddles on a street corner in Montreal. 
Also the eagle, actually the king of birds, here leashed to a tripod somewhere on a sidewalk in St. Petersburg, an abandoned 
beverage booth in the background along with some street barriers moved aside, a man sitting on top of them just as uninvolved.

It is strange worlds that the animals inhabit in Jörg Koopmann’s “The Naked Forest”, the kangaroo in the living room, 
the barking dog on the back seat of a car, or the cow resting in a parking lot. Oddly familiar and yet foreign, these worlds, however, 
bear nothing exotic even if a European gaze might not be at home in them. On the contrary, those street corners and car seats, 
those park benches and front yards, dirt trails and meadows, populated by cats, dogs, ducks, foxes, squirrels, are entirely common 
and everyday places; they are the sites in which our daily lives evolve in this civilized world. At their strangeness as environments,
 they only arrive through being claimed by creatures that are not we. Creatures we may well share our orderly world with, 
but who may not necessarily abide by the rules we have established for it. It is as if a boarder had taken up residence in the house of man, 
a boarder we knew about, whom we even invited ourselves, but who has remained a stranger despite all familiarity. 
A boarder, for example, for whom the garbage can represents the beginning and not the end of the food chain. Through this lens, 
our everyday worlds might not appear entirely alien, but emerge as much more heterogeneous than we generally assume. 
Indelibly, the trace of another life has been inscribed within them, a life that we ordinarily designate as “nature”, locating it beyond 
the territories we believe to have wrenched from it.


  If nothing else, we begin to question these familiar environments due to the way in which we encounter the animals in 
Koopmann’s “Naked Forest”. Caught at mid distance, they are placed in the centre of the image as an opposite of the human gaze, 
without being subservient, but also without getting estranged. The animal is neither anthropomorphized by close-ups nor is it 
completely removed from the human world by being turned into the object of a zoological gaze. Rather, we encounter 
the animal in heterogeneous zones of transition shared by different kinds of bodies, but bodies nevertheless. It neither appears to us as 
the wild counterpart of civilized man nor as its disneyfied alter ego. On the contrary, the animal comes into view as an 
individuated being that shares its habitat with man as both, an at the same time similar and different form of life.

That the space of civilization is not a homogeneous sphere purged of any kind of alterity also becomes apparent in the series 
“Pet Houses”, that Koopmann juxtaposes with the images from “The Naked Forest” in this book. While “The Naked Forest” 
materialized as a coherent series from an originally selective interest over the past ten years, with few exceptions the photos for 
“Pet Houses” were taken in New Orleans during February 2006, about half a year after Hurricane Katrina had laid waste to the city. 
The neighborhoods Koopmann’s photography takes us through are still abandoned at this point in time, the houses damaged, 
the residents have not returned yet. These are images of a disaster that confront us with the other of culture not as a corporeal opposite, 
but as the intrusion of a primary force. The destroyed houses, yards, streets here merely figure as a trace of a 
formerly civilized space that has been overwhelmed and reclaimed by the forces of nature.

At a second glance it shows, however, that the connection between the images is not just the destruction and the disappropriation 
through nature, but also a peculiar system of notations covering the walls of the damaged houses. The facade of a white 
wooden house for example shows the following spray-painted swath: 10/9 CAT SEEN UNDER HOUSE F/W, 
amended in a different script above: 10/13 F/W. And a few pages earlier on the garage door of a single family home in red paint: 
9/28 ONE CAT UPSTAIRS F/W SPCA, next to it further dates and abbreviations in yellow and black script. 
These notations were created in the weeks immediately following the storm. Especially in the poorer districts of New Orleans 
many inhabitants were forced to leave behind their pets due to the refusal of the overtaxed state agencies to evacuate people 
along with their pets. More than 50,000 such animals were thus left to their own devices in the almost 
completely abandoned residential areas. During the following days various non-governmental animals rescue organizations 
like the SPCA and the HSUS supplied water and food for the animals. Under the improvised conditions of the disaster and 
the collapse of infra- and communication structures, they left messages on the walls of houses in order to signal to 
subsequent rescuers, whether and what kind of animals had been found in the homes, 
when and how they had been provided for. (F/W for food and water).

Considering the images in Jörg Koopmann’s “Cat Seen” with this background in mind, the two photo series seem to 
trigger a set of peculiar reversals. While the animal in “The Naked Forest” confronts us as the familiar other of the a civilized world, 
which still blazes its own life’s trail amidst this world, the animals in “Pet Houses” seem to have entirely taken over the 
world of civilisation: especially dogs and cats, but also some fish, swans, and ducks haunt the graffiti of the destroyed houses 
as their new inhabitants. If it wasn’t for our knowledge of the history of these images one could think they have advanced from 
mere boarders to being the new landlords. At the same time, however, it is now man who paves his way through 
the wilderness of the ruins as the other of nature, imposing his signature upon the wild once again by rescuing the pets 
as a domesticated version of himself. Beyond its immediate documentary aspects, Jörg Koopmann’s photography seems to guide us 
into a sphere of reversals and interdependencies, that gives us an idea of what it might mean that the lives of others are also our own.

Text by Daniel Pies
Translation by Sabine Koopmann