Recent research into animal behaviour indicates that, contrary to the belief that horses only respond to stimuli in the moment, they have the ability to think ahead and plan their actions. The horse in this picture by Michel Vanden Eeckhoudt seems to have no urgent need for such strategic thinking. The mane of flaxen tresses, the loose ringlets of the tail, the languorous attitude, meadow flowers as far as the eye can see – Vanden Eeckhoudt’s horse seems to exist in a kind of pony club elysium, idly dreaming an afternoon away.
The Belgian-born photographer’s images of animals often invite you to imagine their subjects’ interior lives, though rarely is the vision as bucolic – or as apparently unperturbed – as this one. Vanden Eeckhoudt’s lazing horse – pictured in a field in Germany in 2012 – comes from his series of animal portraits in his book Doux-Amer (“bittersweet”). If this photo provides a dose of saccharine, it is set against other much starker images of animals in the landscape – feral farm dogs on stony ground, pigs ready for slaughter, catching the photographer’s eye.
Vanden Eeckhoudt, who died in 2015, expressed an uncanny connection with the animals he confronted with his lens. He had started out as a documentary street photographer, with a celebrated series of pictures of recent immigrants, struggling to make new lives in Belgium in the 1970s, and co-founded the fabled Vu picture agency in Paris. He transferred all of that gift for empathy with human subjects to his 1982 book Zoologies, a profound meditation on animals in captivity in which gorillas and monkeys and tigers appeared preternaturally alive to their incarceration. Later, he found vivid accidental comedy in portraits of dogs with their owners. A selection of all of those pictures, including this somnolent horse, features in a new exhibition of Vanden Eeckhoudt’s work near Paris this month.
Zoologies is at Le Carreau de Cergy in Cergy, France, until 2 March
