Why animals fascinate us

Camila Ila Kofler photographed animals, she is the first representative of animalistic photography in the world. A name defines a person, one would say.

There are few people who know about it, so it is an exhibition Kamila Ila Kofler: A look into the world of animals at the Museum of Applied Art is also an opportunity to reveal this photographer to the local public. Digital reproductions of Illa's photographs and documentary material donated to the Museum by Pryor Dodge, the copyright holder of her legacy, American musician, writer, collector and photographer, are on display. The author of the exhibition is Jasna Kujundžić Jovanov.

Camilla Henrietta Koffler was born in Vienna in 1911 and died in New Delhi in 1955. She came to Belgrade in 1926 to study sculpture at the Art School in the class of Petr Palavičini, and to join her mother, who had moved there after her divorce, where she started working as a decorator, opening an interior decoration salon "Lepi dom", where organized exhibitions and sold paintings by important Serbian authors. When her colleagues at the Art School in Belgrade started teasing her about her name, she changed it to Ila (Ylla). She is known in the world as Ila Kofler.

She photographed animals, domestic and wild, in different environments - on the street, in her Paris and then New York studio, in zoos and towards the end of her life, wild ones in their natural habitat - in the wilds of Africa and India. With photographs, she showed how animals communicate, their relationship to their offspring, their reactions, and even an ordinary day of a French poodle, which she spends in different places - in a cafe, a store, a beauty salon. Her photos were published in the press and in numerous books with texts by poets, writers, critics, historians, authors of children's books, and were exhibited at important photography exhibitions and salons at the time.

Ila herself believed that she had a special connection with animals, that it was stronger than the connection with other people, and that her commitment to this photographic genre was not a matter of chance.

She started her artistic career in Belgrade. Jasna Kujundžić Jovanov states that Ila Kofler spent only five years in Belgrade, and that during that time she managed to participate in the Third Autumn Exhibition in 1930, which was also noted by Belgrade critics, to make reliefs that decorated one of the newly opened Belgrade cinemas, probably "Paris", to attend the party that Palavicini organized in his studio in honor of Josephine Becker, and that the photos show that she was at the center of fashionable life as a member of Bob club, also present on the tennis courts in Kalemegdan.

She went to Paris in 1931 for training, and she left sculpture and devoted herself to photography.

As she said, she decided on photography when she "finally understood" that "sculpting will not provide her with a means of living". In the magazine "Vreme" he says about it: "During the rest in the field, I watched the cattle and took pictures of them." The result amused me and I started shooting again. Back in Paris, I already had a whole collection of cows, horses, sheep and pigs and I immediately felt that I would never have the courage to photograph human faces. It's not an easy job…”

In Paris, she opened a studio for photography of animals, primarily pets, and thus began a professional career in the field of animalistic photography, with which she gained world fame. Since 1933, she has organized two solo exhibitions and participated in several collective exhibitions. She exhibited with Erzy Landau, Nora Dima, Brassai, Andre Kertesz, Man Ray, Dora Mar and other prominent photographers of the Parisian scene. She joined the "Society of Artist Photographers" and the Rafo Agency.

"Why do animals fascinate us? I think there are two reasons for that: one is their likeness to us… the 'equality' we feel in them; the other is their difference from us, their complete 'otherness'... When we think about their similarity to us, we tend to overly humanize them, to express sentimentality towards them, to judge them based on human criteria and values... Human beings, in general, are , more interested in animals than animals in human beings. Animals can live perfectly well without us, but we have integrated them into our lives to such an extent, for material reasons, for food, work or society, that we cannot live without them", she wrote in the book Animals.

Given her Jewish origins, her father was a Romanian aristocrat of Hungarian origin, Ila boarded one of the last ships to leave Marseille and arrived in New York on June 6, 1941. There she had to start from the beginning and to some extent renounce her Parisian ambition to portray animals according to the principles of artistic photography - she chose a commercial direction.

Her success in America happened by accident, notes Pryor Dodge in the exhibition catalog, while photographing a fashion show with pandas at the Bronx Zoo. A panda bit her thigh while climbing up her leg, and the event made headlines and sparked a sudden wave of publicity that generated interest in thirty new portraits, four celebrity reports, an article in the New York Times, and three commercials for dog food, which established Illa's career in the United States. Namely, "Ila became popular".

Pryor Dodge states that this Illa success was used by her agent Charles Rado to connect her with the publisher "Harper and Brothers" (now "Harper Collins"). The first of sixteen titles, Everyone saw him (1944), was realized in collaboration with the famous author of children's books, Margaret Wise Brown. An album followed a year after that Psi with portraits of dogs mostly taken in Paris.

Her children's picture books, which she started by showing photographed animal adventures with a story, introduced a change in animal photography. To achieve this, Ila occasionally introduced wild animals into her life, starting with the adventures of a lion cub that she borrowed for a week. The story of a lion cub that follows Ila's photos for the book Sleepy little lion (1947) was written by Wise Brown. She also wrote a story for a picture book O, said the squirrel, because of which Ila had a squirrel in her apartment and, for the sake of photography, she occasionally organized socializing with a cat, a dog, a parrot, a rabbit, a frog, a cockatoo and a monkey. Picture book Strap it was also an example of cooperation with Brown. A picture book Two little bears, a story about two bears, is the only one that Ila wrote herself. Most of Ila's photos, more than 2.100, were published in that book. At the same time, it was her most popular book, and to date it has been published in 22 editions and in 13 languages.

Picture book Sleepy little lion published in French, by Gallimard, opened the international market for her, and marked the beginning of her collaboration with Jacques Préver - the result of a friendship that was not interrupted by her move to another continent. Prever and Ila later collaborated on the aforementioned book for adults, Animals, a collection of one hundred of the best animal portraits she had taken up to that point. The book was printed in 1950 in two English and two French editions, and Prever wrote an introductory text for the French edition in which he poetically recounts the common love for animals that he shares with Ila. The foreword to the English edition was written by Ila herself.

Charles Rado used every opportunity to promote it. He published photo-illustrated reports from books, or sometimes simply offered cover photos to national magazines, bringing Ila directly into living rooms across Europe and the US. He also promoted her photos in advertising campaigns for a variety of products, from pet food to camera equipment and 3M tape. Those campaigns were doubly beneficial: to provide Ili with some income and to contribute to her visibility and improve book sales. Ila dominated the market - until the beginning of the fifties, she was the author of more than half of all animal photos that were published in newspapers, books, magazines, advertisements, on posters, billboards and on various boxes, and for her unique style she was recognizable to the majority of the public. .

Around 1950, Ila Koffler began filming animals in natural conditions, on safari in Africa and India.

"And now, since I only worked in zoos, I had a great desire to photograph animals in their natural environment, whole herds; and that I take slightly different photographs than the portrait of an animal isolated in a cage", explained Ila. After three months in Kenya and Uganda, the book Animals of Africa was created, one of the first books on the subject, first in 1953 in French, then in English and German. It was her work in Africa that inspired Howard Hawks for the character of the photojournalist in the popular film Hatari. "Sports Illustrated" magazine commissioned several articles, one of which was about a twelve-day hunting party with film director John Huston. Ila then said that she suffers because of these hunting experiences: "Why come to India to kill? Really, why?”

By the way, the story of her arrival in India is almost fairy tale "Actually, my childhood dream was to be invited by the maharaja and to see a white elephant, but I never dreamed that it would be enough to send my book to the prince and receive an invitation in return. That's exactly what happened. I sent my book Animals of Africa to the Maharaja of Mysore”.

In her desire to make as authentic pictures of animals as possible and to show them as beings with character that other people do not see in them, she found herself in serious danger more than once. During her stay in India, she took a large number of photographs of elephants, snakes and other animals. On that occasion, in order to capture the white buffalo race as authentically as possible, she tried to film from the roof of a moving jeep; a fall from a vehicle at full speed led to a fatal outcome. She was 44 years old.

"Sports Illustrated" stated that "Ila's pictures brought animals into the living rooms of America and Europe so that they conveyed to viewers the feeling of participating in a wonderful adventure" and that her tragic death "ended an extraordinary career that was at its peak and which contributed to a sense of almost personal loss to millions of people around the world".

Jelena Perać, curator of the exhibition and one of the authors of the texts in the catalog, points out that Ila never aspired to idealize animals, even though she was faced with such requests from the owners from the beginning of her photographic practice. Ila tried to capture a specific expression, a characteristic of a certain specimen of the species, often framing only parts of the body or head, as carriers of specificity. Another significant quality of Ila's photos is tactility - with skillful use of lighting and framing, she managed to very successfully present the texture of the skin, fur, feathers of animals, important determinants of their physical appearance.

She used a Rolleiflex medium format camera. Jelena Perać states that Ila knelt during close-up framing in the studio so that she could be in close contact with her models and that her naturalness in her relationship with animals, which was recorded in numerous photographs (Ila very often and happily posed with her models ), certainly contributed to the portraits being unforced, to represent animals in their real moods and natural tempers. By choosing them as objects of observation and representation, Ila attaches special importance to animals, and thus shapes our perception of animals and our thinking about them.

She was also interested in movement in animals as well as the interaction between different species. One of the early examples of movement research are the "flying cat" photographs, published in the "Picture Post" magazine in 1944, in which the cat was photographed in staged flight. It is even more complex Cat ballet, a series of photographs showing the "dance" of two machetes, published in the magazine "The Illustrated London News" in 1951 and in the book Cats in 1952. Ila often staged combinations of otherwise incompatible animal species, examining their mutual reactions, such as a lion and a rabbit, a squirrel and a cat, a parrot and a squirrel, a monkey and a duck, a duck and a hippopotamus, a mech and a horse, a turtle and a cat.

She experienced the real interaction between different species, as well as the free movement of wild animals in their natural environment, and recorded them on camera during her stay in Africa and India. On those trips, she took thousands of photos, which were translated into a large number of photo-reportages and three books - Animals of Africa, A little elephant and Animals of India. The last book, published posthumously, is considered Ila's most beautiful work.