Creature Features is featured in our Spring 2017 issue.
Photographing a goat is a lot like photographing Beyoncé: You might get just five minutes to shoot the chart-topping chanteuse and capture her essence—similar to the limited window Kevin Horan has to take five or six compelling frames of a lively ruminant.
“You just need a moment,” says Horan, a 30-year photojournalism veteran who lives on Washington’s Whidbey Island. “You need to notice that moment and capture it—that’s what it’s all about.” Over the past eight years, he’s taken dozens of formal, almost anthropomorphic portraits of goats and sheep in western Washington for his “Chattel” study. (The name is semi-ironic, Horan says: “Chattel means property. The word works in opposition to the palpable personality apparent in the pictures.”)
A neighbor’s boisterous sheep initially inspired the project. Today Horan sets up his partially covered al fresco mini-studio at locations such as New Moon Farm Goat Rescue and Sanctuary in Arlington, Wash., and the Island County Fairgrounds. The animals can come and go as they please—the goal is to “get them back in the right lighting as many times as everyone has patience for,” he says.
Although Horan doesn’t want to “go to my grave as the goat photographer,” he says, “Chattel” is ongoing. “I still see goats I want to photograph so I’m not quite sure how to bring it to an end,” he adds, with a laugh.
To learn more about “Chattel” and purchase prints, visit kevinhoran.com.
Mr. Beasley #1
Stanwood #1
Jake #4
Xenia #1
Bella #1
Mandy #2
Lizzie #1
Sydney #3
Lela #2
Photographer Kevin Horan
Kevin Horan is an artist based in Langley, Wash. He is working on projects which look at animals as people, people as animals, and the planet as a very small place. His pictures are reality-based, and he enjoys finding the amazing hidden in the ordinary. His work from "Chattel" was selected for the Photolucida Critical Mass Top 50 in 2014.
