Animals star in Center for Creative Photography’s new show | News

The Center for Creative Photography (CCP) has opened a new show and it’s a good one. Digging into the vaults, CCP chief curator Rebecca Senf pulled out 150 photos of animals, sometimes interacting with people, sometimes for a formal portrait and sometimes the animals are in their own natural environment.

Called “Animality: 100 Years of Photographs,” the show is appropriate for families with children of all ages. What really makes this show special, however, is not just the subject matter but who curated it. Seven University of Arizona honors students each selected their favorites of 140 photos Senf had put together. She divided the photos into four print viewings: dogs and cats, marine mammals and birds, farm animals and finally wild animals.

“The students came in person and for each print viewing they got a ballot,” Senf said. “Once they’d seen all of the photographs, each student made a selection of 10 to 15 photographs that were the ones that they found the most intriguing or confusing or enticing or upsetting, photos that really sparked their interest.”

Then she worked with each student to help them whittle down their selections into a topic or theme.

“In the final show you actually see each student’s finished group with their title and their text and their name with their graduation date and their major and the selection of works they chose,” Senf said. “You literally know whose idea you’re encountering as you go through the exhibition.”

Senf selected and is showing a couple of groupings as well.

It’s the center’s collection, in fact one particular photographer’s work, that inspired Senf to create the exhibition.

“I’ve been wanting to do an animal show for as long as I can remember,” she said. “We have the archive of an early 20th-century animal photographer, a woman named Ylle. … She became renowned as an animal photographer. She was published in books and magazines.”

Along with Senf, the curators were students of Professors Netzin and Dieter Steklis’ fall 2025 course, Human and Animal Interrelationships, in the School of Animal and Comparative Biomedical Sciences. For the most part they knew nothing about art and even less about what it takes to mount an exhibition or even what an exhibition is. Senf worked with each student individually while they made their choices.

“The students had an opportunity to curate and think about what an exhibition is and how these photographs tell stories and how they could have a creative experience of bringing objects together to convey their own idea,” she said.

Senf said she also learned. She had to be flexible, trying to see things from the students’ point of view.

“I had to really think about how to share and explain what I do,” she said. “I’ve been at the center 19 years and so at this point my process is so internalized and intuitive that it was really very powerful to be forced to make it explicit and externalize it and teach it.”

The seven honors students who helped curate the exhibition are:

• Dylan J. Brown (’28), Nursing

• Maya Cervantes (’28), Biology: Biomedical science

• Emma Charles (’27), Physiology and medical sciences

• Charles Elliott (’27), Optical engineering

• Emily Hogg (’28), Nursing

• Emma Mireles (’27), Veterinary science, Human and Animal Interrelationships

Shay Parchem (’28), Biology with a biomedical sciences emphasis; music with violin performance emphasis

Alongside the framed photos in the gallery will be a large monitor with photos selected by a second cohort of students. They are:

• Derek Dewyer

• Riley Weltmann

• Lucy Waddell

• Ariana Laguna-Garcia

• Karsten Yin

There is also an opportunity for the public to show off their own furry family members in a show called “Animals Everywhere,” a rotating community exhibition which will be displayed on a monitor outside the gallery. Use the link in the boxed area to submit your photo.

Other events are planned around the exhibition such as a “Social Night of Art and Photography,” from 5 to 7 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 3 at the center. There will be family activities, light refreshments and one very interesting talk. Professors Netzin and Dieter Steklis and Senf are presenting the program.

“They’re going to talk about their background as primatologists and about the class (Human and Animal Interrelationships) and introduce their way of teaching about the human/animal interrelationship,” Senf said. “Then we’re going to do a really fun “Jeopardy!” style quiz as the participatory part of the lecture where it will be like a game people in the audience can play with us.”