I once carried with me for about two days a newly born mouse that I had stumbled upon ... I kept him nestled in my bra, taking him out every two hours, filling his translucent tummy white with a single drop of goat's milk ... helping him poop, then gently washing his delicate little bottom.

I was caught in this most desperate place ... me, clinging onto his life ... every yawn, every stretch ... a very special, a very unstable place.

When he was gone, I found that in an instant, I was out of that place ... he was no longer that beautiful little baby whose every gesture made me smile deep inside. Just like that, he was a pink blob of bubble gum.

***

During the three years of shooting Animalerie, I was in that same desperate place. I purposefully sought out small pet shops all over the United States and Europe ... actually drawn by them. To enter ... was for me ... this same fleeting glance ... this same chance to connect to something very special yet wrong. There, over and over, side by side, I was shown the boiled down rue of life ... adorned with complete neuroses repeated to a perfection ... That ... or just a numbed dormant death.

I chose not to show the endless forgotten bloated dead bodies ... the sick left dying ... The frightened-eyed fish sucked next to and stuck on the tank's water filtration system, its body overlapping another already lifeless tank mate ... The frenzy when baby mice were picked from their warm soft nest and dropped in the adjacent tank of a hungry snake, or carnivorous lizard ... The awkward stretching and silent searching of the blind pink newborn's body, the reptile's forked red tongue sent into a wild flicking frenzy, lapping up molecules of fresh live scent ... Or the frantic searching mother, and sometimes father, of the pinkies and fuzzies, forever in a state of confusion over their continuously, mysteriously, disappearing pups ... Not those endless never-changing stories.

***

At first, the photographs were all made to include bits of visual information showing their containers ... Then one day I found, with the exact intensity with which I looked, I was being looked at. Locked in this meeting, I then began to see. I was taken and shown a very special place, a world in between worlds, but a place that remains, just the same. This was a place where living, breathing, looking objects—inventory, toys, titillations, obsessions, birthday gifts, and specimens ... blobs of bubble gum—managed to live, undaunted, and go about some form of life's daily rituals ... altered and unnatural, yet still possessing all its passion ... filled with beauty, heightened by grace ... sublime in their fleeting existence. There, I found beautiful treasures, not disposable trifles.