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SummaryThis article proposes a post-humanist reading of Fanie Jason's photo essay on carthorses in Greater Cape Town. When social realist photography includes non-human animals, they tend to be relegated to the margins of representation: sentimentalised, sensationalised, denigrated or ignored, both metaphorically and literally, they all but disappear. Jason's photographs, however, pose provocative questions about the carthorse body and its intersomatic connections with the human body. The horses demand attention, often looking back at the camera lens and the viewer. Conventional anthropocentric theories of photography offer nothing to a methodology which seeks to engage with the visual non-human animal, but theories of animals in art and in film contribute valuably to such a methodology. A post-humanist gaze not only subverts the human and non-human as necessarily inimical realms, but analyses how the photographs themselves extend the purview of social realist images. Post-humanism – in its denial of the exceptionalism of the human subject in relation to the non-human animal and in its discounting of the humanist preoccupation with consciousness, language and individual agency – theorises human-non-human animal relations in new ways. Thus, a post-humanist reading of Jason's photographs considers the embodied commonalities of human and horse. It eschews a humanist celebration of agency on which the notion of subjectivity is predicated, preferring instead to regard agency as relational and exterior – as Jonathan Burt suggests in his discussion of the “visual animal” (2002: 31).
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