New York City-based photographer Amy Stein creates “modern dioramas of our new natural history.” Her Domesticated series, which we first spotted on Faith is Torment, is set in the small Pennsylvania town of Matamoras. The area borders a scenic state forest. Each image is “constructed based on real stories from local newspapers and oral histories of intentional and random interactions between humans and animals.” The works show an uneasy meeting between man and nature, and explore humanity’s relationship with the “wild’ — the ways we attempt to dominate, domesticate, and connect with it. It’s a never-ending fascination that man has engaged for centuries, and nature has endured. Stein’s eco-tableaux powerfully confronts us with that anxiety and its strange beauty. See more of Domesticated in our gallery below. You can purchase a monograph of the work, which won the Best Book award at the 2008 New York Photo Festival, over here. Visit the artist’s photographs in person when Fairy Tales, Monsters, and the Genetic Imagination opens at the Glenbow Art Museum next year.
Image credit: Amy Stein
Image credit: Amy Stein
Image credit: Amy Stein
Image credit: Amy Stein
Image credit: Amy Stein
Image credit: Amy Stein
Image credit: Amy Stein
Image credit: Amy Stein
Image credit: Amy Stein
Image credit: Amy Stein