Dutch Culture USA
Charlotte Dumas
Charlotte Dumas attended the Rietveld Academie of Amsterdam from 1996-2000 and later studied as a resident at the Rijksacademy for visual Arts in Amsterdam from 2001-2002. Dumas is an animal photographer, using her standard 80 mm lens on medium format to reveal an up-close view of the complex relationship between her animal subjects and her human viewers.
In all of her studies of animals, Charlotte Dumas highlights the intricacies of the relationship between humans and their mammalian animal counterparts, creating an intimate feeling between the viewer and her depictions of horses and dogs while distancing the viewer from the more dangerous subjects of the wolf and tiger. In each of her projects, Dumas inspires her viewers to sympathize with the ever-caged animal, entrapped in a world dominated by the supreme mammal-human.
In 2002, Dumas completed her first major project entitled "Four Horses," in which she photographed four working police horses in Rotterdam. This project served to inspire her next series of photographs in 2004, "Day is Done," in which she photographed horses from the Carabinieri a cavallo in Rome. Dumas returned to the subject of horses once again in 2006, photographing race horses in Palermo in the series "Palermo 7."
Dumas continues her exploration of the service animal in her most recent series, Anima by photographing the burial horses of the Arlington National Cemetery. These intensely personal and up-close portraits of draft horses that serve the 3rd Infantry Regiment, known as the Old Guard, reveal a powerful human connection to these honored animals.