Ed Panar: The States Project: Pennsylvania

Ed Panar: The States Project: Pennsylvania by DeAnn DesiletsApril 20, 2016

©Ed Panar

I discovered Ed Panar’s work through the Muybridge’s Horse Blog last year and immediately became obsessed with his series, Animals That Saw Me. If you know me and my own work, I love the idea of playfulness within art. Panar has nailed this series using animals that he encounters, or more like animals that find him first. The title of the series alone, along with the way the animals are framed and naturally posed, make the narrative come to life.

We all have experienced meetings with creatures in the natural and domesticated world face on. There is always a sense of excitement, glee or awe when they turn and meet your gaze, or when you turn around and meet the gaze of an unexpected critter. Those moments humanize them; you lock eyes and connect, and wonder if they think you are as majestic as they are, or perhaps just as weird.

Ed has been guest teaching at the University of Hartford with Melissa Catanese; together they run Spaces Corners, a small project space/photography bookshop in Pittsburgh. Through this company he has published a tiny book called Falling Asleep, and together they have curated a selection of photo-books they called Paper Movies at the Joseloff Gallery in West Hartford, that was on view this past January- February.

Since 2007, Ed Panar has published numerous photobooks including Animals That Saw Me (The Ice Plant, 2011), Salad Days (Gottlund 2011), Same Difference (Gottlund, 2010), and Golden Palms (J&L Books, 2007). His photographs and books have been published and exhibited internationally at venues including The Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, Nofound Photofair, Paris, The New York Photography Festival and the Cleveland Museum of Art. Ed is a co-founder of the project space and photography bookshop Spaces Corners, and currently lives and works among the forested hills and hollows of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Animals That Saw Me

Animals That Saw Me is a meditation on the uncanny moment of recognition between species. These are photographs of unexpected encounters with various everyday creatures I had while wandering the back streets and side roads of various locations over the past 20 years. The first collection of photographs from this ongoing series was published in 2011 and volume two will be released in Fall 2016 by The Ice Plant.

Roaming the natural and urban world with a camera for over 16 years, often alone, on foot, keeping a low profile, Ed Panar has repeatedly been caught in the act of photography—not by other people, but by a random assortment of familiar animals: cows, cats, frogs, dogs, turtles, deer, geese…you name it. The animal sees Ed, and Ed sees the animal; an unspoken communication passes between them. If he’s lucky, the moment is captured on film, catalogued, tagged for future reference. In Animals That Saw Me: Volume One Panar brings together the first collection of his most surprising and unexpected encounters with ordinary fauna—a brief, deadpan field study of the uncanny moment of recognition between species. What exactly have the animals seen? The pictures are a reminder that we must appear as strange and exotic to them as they do to us.