A matter of life and death

Catherine Chalmers takes photographs of animals at their most beastly: quasi-gladiatorial images of insects, reptiles and amphibians mating, killing and devouring each other (in one case, all three). What makes her work all the more unnerving, however, is that she captures these deadly embraces in a wholly unnatural environment. In doing so, argues Libby Brooks - and irrespective of our response to them, be that intrigued, horrified, even repulsed - Chalmers questions our own sense of morality
The taut skin of a plump red tomato buckles and rips, then oozes flesh, as a caterpillar begins to feed. A praying mantis clamps the candy-striped larva between its front legs. It tears into the turquoise underbelly, and a viscous bulb of tomato pulp erupts. Two mantises meet, dance, mount. They hold each other intensely, then suddenly her jaws are on his neck. Another mantis hops nervously around a slick, petrol-coloured tree frog. The frog yawns and gapes. Its puckered pink tongue flashes and the mantis is gone.

Welcome to the food chain. Death nourishes. Sex kills. Hunger is brutal. It is these fundamentals of existence - eating, mating, dying - that are explored at their nexus in artist Catherine Chalmers' vivid photography of insects, amphibians and reptiles. Capturing small deaths in huge detail, her magnified prints allow a dignity and authority to species normally left under the carpet. Because size matters, not only in relationships between animals but in mediating our typically human responses to them. "If it's smaller than your foot and you can step on it, then it seems okay that you do so," says Chalmers. "Because it's small, you can step on an ant and walk away. If the ant were the size of a hippopotamus, our relationship with it would be entirely different.

"We have this idea that a lion is the predator and the zebra a prey, but a zebra can also kill a lion with one kick. The predator/prey scenario can very quickly reverse if the size proportion is wrong. So one of my praying mantises got attacked by a caterpillar that grew too big and they rolled around the set. When I put the tarantula and a full-grown mantis together, I realised it could have done some damage to the spider."

Her exhibition prints deliberately confound perspective. The praying mantis is large enough to eat the viewer. Baby mice, fed to snakes and frogs, are the size of human newborns. The deaths of these "pinkies" - blind, hairless, vulnerable - are particularly chilling. The baby strains vainly, then relaxes into submission as the snake wraps itself around her tiny form, first caressing then gobbling.

But is empathy genus-specific? Do we care about the fate of a mouse more than that of a caterpillar? Ambiguity is Chalmers' lexicon. "As humans, we tend to root for the underdog," she says. "There is one kill, but it depends on how you present the information. What animal you want to live and die is entirely subjective, from person to person and day to day."

Raising her subjects from birth in her New York loft, Chalmers found her own relationship to them swinging between the maternal and the functional. "I had lots of caterpillars and they bit me every time I picked them up. They also had this spectacularly beautiful death when they were ripped open, so when I fed them to the mantis I always looked forward to it.

"But the mantises were so difficult to keep: it took a mini-ecosystem to raise them. I had to give them live food, fruit flies when they're babies, then houseflies, then crickets, and they were all housed individually because they're cannibalistic. It would take me four hours to feed the brood, fly by fly. They have a head that moves on a neck much like ours, unlike most insects, where the head and body are fused. They look back at you with two big eyes. I got to really like them. When I first put one up on set with a tarantula, I procrastinated. I was attached to them and it really touched me."

Her tarantula, however, was a docile creature. "So the longer it didn't eat, the more I wanted it to, and I then began to worry about why the spider was rejecting food."

The baby mice, which she nicknames "nature's Cheerios", elicited less sympathy: "It didn't bother me with the pinkies. They couldn't see and it was over very quickly. But as my snake got to be eating full-grown mice, with fur and individual characteristics, the mouse would get scared. It realised that there was imminent danger and I hated doing that. So I felt totally different about the same animal at a different age."

Chalmers, 41, studied engineering and designed toys before going to the Royal College of Art in London. Working with images of mythological creatures on canvas, she gradually became less interested in paint and more fascinated by the animals themselves. Composing pictures using materials from the natural world, she began to experiment with fly carcasses. Raising the flies herself, she realised they were far more interesting alive than dead.

Although she knew little about the technicalities, the transparency of the photographic medium appealed: "I borrowed a friend's macro lens, and when I looked at the flies against a white background I could see them for the first time in a way that I couldn't with my naked eye." Some of her series of photographs are published in a book, Food Chain: Encounters Between Mates, Predators, And Prey, and an exhibition of her photographs of roaches is currently on show in London.

"I was interested in the animals that are often referred to as the pest species - insects, rodents, some reptiles - that ecologically are essential to the earth's function but which we ignore or hate and kill. Houseflies interested me because they essentially live their lives with us. They live indoors in a house like humans, and have a parallel life of their own."

We take these species seriously only in our desperation to eliminate them, she argues, pointing to the billions of dollars spent each year on pesticides. We despise the abundant, unaware that the way we live tends to increase the species we hate most, the ones that live off us. "One of the things we don't like about insects is that they work on numbers. You can kill one fly, or 10, you can kill 100 roaches, but you're never going to get them all. There's always another one coming. It's that lack of control, and their ability to insert themselves into our lives whenever they want to, that bothers us. They live lives that seem to be the most opposite of ours - they eat their young, females eat males - and do all sorts of things that, to our mammalian code of ethics, are outrageous."

Chalmers aims to confront our separation from the natural and the base instinctual. It's one thing to observe a food chain, she says, and another to be part of it. "It's possible, in the west, to go through life without seeing any of the basic mechanisms of the natural world. We don't see the bird eat too many worms. It's easy to eat a hamburger and never have killed a cow."

So she recreates in her studio that which exists in a world from which we are removed. "I wanted to find out what it was like to see something so true to the functions of the earth but so removed from us as humans. It's very easy to have a connection with nature in the form of a cute little puppy. It's much more difficult to be in touch with the parts of nature from which we have worked throughout time to separate ourselves."

But where does natural begin and unnatural end? Nowadays, natural means make-up, muesli, mineral water. "It's one of those words whose definition changes throughout time. We would call a nature reserve natural because there are no buildings or roads there. But that reserve has been completely modified and managed by human beings."

While her photographs portray the most natural of impulses, her subjects are pictured against a stark white background more reminiscent of a fashion shoot than traditional nature photography. "I wanted a neutral place that was away from nature and away from us. The tree frogs are originally from Australia, the mantises from China. The caterpillars and the tomato were the only things indigenous to the US. They would never have met were it not for humans and, more specifically, me. I didn't come across them in the wild, so putting them back there was beside the point."

But that neutral space was the locus of extreme events. "At first, I was horrified that I was raising animals to eat each other. I felt that was beyond what someone should do. I'd never killed an animal before in my life, and throughout this project I never did, myself," she qualifies. Was there a sense that she was playing God among her glass cases? "Every time I reached into the cage of mice, there would be a pile of little pinkies. They all looked the same and I could reach for one or, in a half-inch, reach for another. That was unsettling. I didn't like being the one to choose. Part of me felt bad playing God, and the other part felt I was doing a good job raising my snake."

She takes a pragmatic view of the inevitable animal-rights concerns, arguing that she cares for her animals painstakingly well and simply feeds them what they require. We are all involved in a little bit of God-playing, she says. "We have zoos all over the world that are used now for conservation and breeding programmes. We have got ourselves into a position where, in the natural world, things are so out of balance that there is a need for intervention on our part, trying to put it right, or to what we believe is supposed to be right.

"Should we have pets at all? Look what we've done to dogs. You buy a beagle, which has been entirely manipulated for our pleasure to look like that. Then we have a whole industry that takes cows and grinds them up into little dog pellets. At what point do you start interjecting a morality?"

And whose morality? The predator and the prey bring their own survival imperatives to the kill. We add a third human eye. We are both fascinated and repelled by violence among animals, but do we impose our own ethics upon them? "That's certainly bound up in which animals we like and dislike. We tend to like other mammals, enjoy the ones that are soft, with big eyes, and tend not to like the ones with glassy eyes and scales. "But saving the ecosystem of a certain species of worm may be more important because it preserves the forest in its entirety - the world could ecologically function very well without humans and function pretty well without mammals, but get rid of the insects and things would fall apart very quickly."

What separates us from the subjects of these photographs: an accident of biology, the superiority of civilisation, a distrust of instinct? And whose side are we on? Perhaps it is because these creatures are most different from us that we like them least. But out of context and perspective, their stories resonate. It is Chalmers' art to make the ugly beautiful, and the unknowable accessible.

• These pictures are taken from Food Chain: Encounters Between Mates, Predators, And Prey, published by Aperture, priced £18.95. To order a copy at £16.95 (plus 99p UK p&p), call Guardian CultureShop on 0800 316 6102. Roaches, an exhibition of photographs of cockroaches, is on show at the Percy Miller Gallery, 39 Snowfields, London SE1, until June 10.

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