Amelia and the Animals (2002-2015) Aperture books, 2014
Amelia & Emily and Swan Song (2016-2018)

My journey with my daughter is driven to depict our relationships with animals in the hope that these moments portray the sameness of humans and animals.

The Amelia and the Animals photographs, and the last portion of the project, Amelia & Emily and Swan Song, are drawn from actual adventures undertaken with my daughter in the interspecies private world that we inhabit with animals of all varieties.

In this world, the line between human and animal overlaps, or is blurred, where animals are part of our world, and humans are part of theirs. Amelia and I play out our fantasies, and explore our eccentricities, to create a cultural space in the photographs where animals not only co-exist with humans, but also interact as full partners.

(It’s important for me to note that Amelia is connecting with real, live, animals. No one is Photo-shopped into the images).

Robin Schwartz is a 2016 Guggenheim Fellow in Photography, and her photographs are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, among others.

All of Schwartz’s photography is animal centric. A fourth monograph, Amelia and the Animals, published by the Aperture Foundation, is a fourteen year project with photographs she made of her daughter with exotic and domestic animals. These photographs have been published in The New York Times Magazine, TIME LightBox, The New Yorker, The Guardian, and other publications.

Selected presentations include master talks at National Geographic Annual Photography Seminar, LOOK3 The Festival of the Photograph, the Eddie Adams Workshop, the Aperture Foundation, FotoDC Week, and the Chrysler Museum of Art. Robin created and edited the National Geographic Your Shot assignment: The Animals We Love, and wrote the corresponding chapter in the National Geographic book, Getting Your Shot, published in 2015.

Robin Schwartz is a professor of photography at William Paterson University in New Jersey and has taught at the International Center of Photography in New York City.