Jo-Anne McArthur | |
|---|---|
 Canadian Photojournalist Jo-Anne McArthur. Photo Credit - Josée Van Wissen | |
| Born | (1976-12-23)December 23, 1976 (age 48) |
| Occupation(s) | Photojournalist, animal advocate, author |
| Known for | We Animals We Animals Media Unbound Project The Ghosts in Our Machine |
| Notable work | We Animals (2014) Captive (2017) HIDDEN: Animals in the Anthropocene (2020) |
| Website | joannemcarthur |
Jo-Anne McArthur (born December 23, 1976) is a Canadianphotojournalist, humane educator,animal rights activist and author. She is known for herWe Animals project, a photography project documenting human relationships with animals. Through the We Animals Humane Education program, McArthur offers presentations about human relationships with animals in educational and other environments, and through the We Animals Archive, she provides photographs and other media for those working to help animals. We Animals Media, meanwhile, is a media agency focused on human/animal relationships.
McArthur was the primary subject of the 2013 documentaryThe Ghosts in Our Machine, directed byLiz Marshall, and with Keri Cronin, she is the founder of the Unbound Project, which aims to celebrate and recognize female animal activists. Her first book,We Animals, was published in 2013; her second,Captive, was published in 2017; and a third,Hidden: Animals in the Anthropocene, which was co-authored with the journalist Keith Wilson, was published in 2020. McArthur has been awarded a range of commendations for her photography and activism, including several commendations in theWildlife Photographer of the Year awards and joint first place in theCOP26 photography competition.
McArthur was raised inOttawa,Ontario, and studied Geography and English at theUniversity of Ottawa.[1] She decided to pursue photography after taking an elective course on black-and-white photography at university.[2]
She originally entered photography motivated byartistry, but her motives subsequently changed, and she instead came to see her camera as her "tool for creating change". Her earlier work photographing animals was in the genre ofstreet photography, but she now increasingly photographs captive animals, sometimes while undercover.[3] In 2010, the trauma of her work led to her being diagnosed withpost-traumatic stress disorder, though she has since recovered. Her photographs are sometimes published anonymously.[1]
Her work has been published in a variety of media, including the newspaperThe Guardian,[4][5] the magazinesNational Geographic[6] andVice,[7] and the news websiteNational Observer.[8] In addition, her photographs have been used by over 100 animal advocacy organizations[9] and in academic work on human-animal relationships.[10]
McArthur appeared in the top 50 of theCanadian Broadcasting Corporation Champions of Change contest,[11] and onMore's fourth annual "Fierce" list.[12] She has also been awarded theInstitute for Critical Animal Studies's 2014 Media Award, and theToronto Vegetarian Association's 2013 Lisa Grill Compassion for Animals Award (withLiz Marshall).[1][13]Farm Sanctuary awarded her the 2013 "Friend of Farm Animals" award,[14] and listed her as one of their "Heroes of Compassion" in 2016.[15]
In 2018, McArthur was awarded theWildlife Photographer of the Year People's Choice award for a photograph of Pikin, alowland gorilla rescued from poachers byApe Action Africa, in the arms of Appolinaire Ndohoudou, a carer, while Pikin was being transported between two sanctuaries inCameroon.[16][17] The photograph was selected by voters from a shortlist of 24 chosen by theNatural History Museum. McArthur said that she was "so thankful that this image resonated with people", hoping that it might "inspire us all to care a little bit more about animals ... No act of compassion towards them is ever too small."[16] She went on to win the Special Award of the Jury for the best single picture entry as a part of TheAlfred Fried Photography Award 2018 for the same photograph. The jury were unanimous in their decision, and described the photograph by saying:
Jo-Anne McArthur firmly believes that animals are individuals and have feelings. And if proof were needed she supplied it with this magnificent picture full of tenderness. A moment when it transpires that animals too know a feeling of safety and comfort, are able and willing to trust and need affection. And that they recognize when it is offered to them.[18]
In the 2019 Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition, McArthur's photo "The Wall of Shame" was "highly commended" in the photojournalism category. The photo features the skins ofrattlesnakes surrounded by the bloody handprints of people who had skinned a snake at arattlesnake round-up inSweetwater, Texas.[19][20]
In 2020, her photograph "Hope in a Burned Forest" (or "Hope in Burned Plantation"), featuring a kangaroo surrounded by burned woodland, was named the winner in the Wildlife Photographer of the Year "man and nature" category.[21] It is a photograph of aneastern grey kangaroo and her calf in a burnedeucalyptus forest nearMallacoota, Victoria, in an area damaged during the2019–20 Australian bushfire season.[22][23] The same photograph was a winner of the Grand Prize in the 2021 BigPicture Natural World Photography Competition,[24][25] and was "highly commended" in theWildlife Photographer of the Year People's Choice Award.[26]
McArthur jointly won theCOP26 photography competition for a photograph of a sow and piglet on an industrial pork farm in Italy. (The other winner wasDoug Gimesy.) Her "Hope in a Burned Forest" and a photograph of a cow being transported across a border were also finalists.[27][28] McArthur's photograph of Ron, a chimp formerly used forinvasive research, was the winner of the "Man and Nature" category in the 2021's Asociación Española de Fotógrafos de Naturaleza (AEFONA) "Photography for Conservation" Contest.[29]
McArthur was a judge for the 2021World Press Photo contest in the "Nature" category.[30]
McArthur conceived of the We Animals project in around 1998 after an encounter with a monkey chained to a windowsill inEcuador. She photographed the monkey as she was appalled at the treatment, and "knew that the way [she] saw our treatment of animals was important, and [she] wanted to share that point of view".[3][31] On its website, We Animals is described as:
an ambitious project which documents, through photography, animals in the human environment. Humans are as much animal as the sentient beings we use for food, clothing, research, experimentation, work, entertainment, slavery and companionship. With this as its premise, We Animals aims to break down the barriers that humans have built which allow us to treat non-human animals as objects and not as beings with moral significance. The objective is to photograph our interactions with animals in such a way that the viewer finds new significance in these ordinary, often unnoticed situations of use, abuse and sharing of spaces.[14]
In December 2013,We Animals, aphotobook by McArthur containing both text and over 100 of her photographs, was published byLantern Books.[32] The activistBruce Friedrich, in a review published byThe Huffington Post, described it as "the most gorgeous book [he had] experienced in many years", one which "offers haunting sadness, [but also] intense hope".[33] InThe Guardian in 2020,Ziya Tong selected the book as one of the best to widen readers' world views, writing that "McArthur brings an empathetic lens to the grim reality – mostly unchallenged – of millions of lives spent in captivity".[34]
McArthur has spoken in educational institutions since 2008.[35] In 2014, a grant was awarded to McArthur to develop the We Animals Humane Education project by The Pollination Project and the Thinking Vegan.[36] McArthur offers a variety of presentations in school, university and other environments.[37][38] The program seeks to "foster awe, curiosity and critical thinking about our relationships with animals", to "instill reverence, respect and responsibility", inspire empathy with animals, to "create gentler stewards of the earth", and to encourage people to be "agents of positive change".[39] In 2017, McArthur launched the We Animals Archive, an archive of thousands of photographs and videos of animals in human-dominated environments. The Archive serves as a repository of media from the wider We Animals project that can be freely used by individuals and organizations working towards animal-protection goals.[40][41] The Archive was subsequently replaced by We Animals Media.f
In 2019, We Animals Media (WAM) – amedia agency focused on stories of animal exploitation – was launched.[42][43] McArthur is the founder and director, while other contributors include the journalist Corinne Benedict, the writer Kate Fowler, the photojournalist and filmmaker Aaron Gekoski, the filmmaker Alex Lockwood, the writer Anna Mackiewicz, the journalist Jessica Scott-Reid, the photographer and filmmaker Chris Showbridge, and the writer Sayara Thurston.[44] Projects of We Animals Media include the We Animals Media Photography Masterclass with McArthur.[45] It is financially supported by private donors and grants from, among others, theOpen Philanthropy Project.[46]
WAM features thousands of moving and still images that are free to use for people and organizations aiding animals. It was described inThe Walrus as "possibly the largest archive of such images in the world".[46] McArthur takes pictures for WAM, and many of its images were originally captured by her, but WAM has a wide range of contributors. McArthur says that "Hopefully, eventually, there'll be no more need for the archive ... It'll literally be an archive, a historical, closed archive of what was and should never again be. Hopefully, in my lifetime."[46]
McArthur published a second book through Lantern, entitledCaptive, in 2017. The book—which features contributions from the activistVirginia McKenna and the philosopherLori Gruen—focuses on the animals inzoos andaquaria.[47] It also contains a series of short essays by McArthur.Stephen F. Eisenman reviewed the book forAnimal Liberation Currents, comparing McArthur's photography with that of other zoo photographers and photographers of humanprisons. He said that
McArthur'sCaptive is a powerful, visual survey of zoo animals and their physical conditions of captivity. But precisely because it examines so many different zoos and animals, its cannot provide significant insight either into the subjectivity of captive animals, or the ideological and economic function of zoological gardens. The merging of close and sustained photographic observation and detailed institutional history and critique is what is most lacking in the current generation of zoo books. That's a worthwhile project for McArthur and her peers in the future.[48]
Photographs from the book appeared in the We Animals Archive in a section called A Year in Captivity. They were also exhibited atToronto'sHarbourfront Centre in September 2017.[49]
McArthur's third book,Hidden: Animals in the Anthropocene (co-authored with the journalist Keith Wilson) is about "our conflict with non-human animals around the globe, as depicted through the lenses of thirty award-winning photojournalists", with a foreword written byJoaquin Phoenix.[50] It was released in 2020.[51][52] Writing inThe Guardian, Olivia Wilson described the book as shedding "light on industrial scale factory farms and slaughterhouses ... [revealing] in often bloody detail how little we know about what goes on within these windowless walls".[52]]
McArthur was inspired byJames Nachtwey's photobookInferno, which featured photographs of "what we do to each other", and "moved [her] to the core". She "knew animals needed a book like this. With the growing number of photographers who are turning their lenses to an invisible war, one that few people see, the war on animals, I knew we could create something historic, an indictment."[53]
Hidden: Animals in the Anthropocene jointly won the 2021Independent Publisher Book Award for book "Most Likely to Save the Planet" withCarrie Packwood Freeman'sThe Human Animal Earthling Identity, published byUniversity of Georgia Press.[54] It won the "Photography Book of the Year" award at the 78thPictures of the Year awards.[55] The book's photographs were displayed at London'sNatural History Museum,[56] Berlin's F³ – Freiraum für Fotografie,[57] and Perpignan'sVisa pour l'Image.[58]
With Keri Cronin, an associate professor ofart history at the Department of Visual Arts atBrock University, McArthur founded the Unbound Project, a multimedia and book project aiming "to recognize and celebrate women at the forefront of animal advocacy, in both a contemporary and historical context", and to "inspire our audience to do what they can to make the world a kinder, gentler place for all species".[59][60][61] Contemporary women profiled includeAnita Krajnc,Carol J. Adams,Hilda Kean,Wendy Valentine,Leah Garcés,Seba Johnson,Lek Chailert,Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka,Marianne Thieme, andElisa Aaltola.[62] Historical women profiled includeLizzy Lind af Hageby,Ruth Harrison,Elizabeth Stuart Phelps,Dorothy Brooke,Caroline Earle White,Louisa May Alcott,Anna Laetitia Barbauld, andFanny Martin.[63]
McArthur was the "main human subject" of the 2013 documentary filmThe Ghosts in Our Machine, directed byLiz Marshall.[64] The film avoids the shocking imagery of many documentaries focused on animal rights, such asEarthlings, meaning that it "takes an almost arthouse approach, resulting in a film that's more a meditation on suffering and the relationship between humans and other species, than an angry, didactic diatribe".[65] Writing inVariety, the critic Peter Debruge said that
It's enough to make you sad, not for the animals (to whom human cruelty is nothing new), but for McArthur, this beautiful young woman who feels so deeply for those not of her kind that she carries their collective suffering around with her daily. What must it be like to experience PTSD after visiting dairy farms and facilities that supply primates for medical testing?[66]
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