There is a passage by the poet Gary Snyder that has stuck with me for many years, where he suggests that animals, sitting still as they do for long periods, appear to be meditating.

When I remember this passage, I recall the bison I saw one summer in Yellowstone National Park. A friend and I were camped at Pebble Creek in the northeast of the park, against the Absaroka Mountains. In the morning, I woke early and saw the bison lying in Round Prairie in exactly that contemplative attitude. They were still as boulders that had come to rest, Buddha-like in their pose.

Alice Zilberberg’s photograph, Be Here Bison, mimics this expression vividly. The animal, rendered precisely in color, is caught in contemplation, a glimmer of light in its dark eye. It stands somewhat away from us, its head turned slightly in our direction. But its attention is elsewhere; the viewer is not in its regard. Its concern lies beyond the frame, perhaps simultaneously inward and outwardly, and its very stance invites us to assume the same peace of mind.

As with other photographs in her series, Meditations, the animal is located in a landscape suggesting emptiness. The bare ground seems to be cracking, flaking away, no longer solid. In the distance, a row of mountains disappear into a white mist that dominates most of the frame. Despite the bleakness of the setting, there is a sense of a being that remains untroubled and undisturbed.

I first came upon Zilberberg’s art entirely by accident—a happy accident, at that. I was visiting the Moremen Gallery in downtown Louisville, Kentucky, for a completely different opening, and as I moved through the gallery, I was struck by these large images—printed on metal (they were created at Unique Imaging Concepts here in town) and immaculately framed in white wood—measuring up to 62 by 42 inches.

The effect of the images is not only striking, but calming. They encourage silence. They prod you to abandon yourself.

Zilberberg’s art, though detailing animals, pushes wildlife photography beyond portraiture and into the conceptual. The works are composites of images taken around the world, meticulously crafted in post-production over a period of months. For her, the images are “an expression of self-therapy,” and she refers to them as digital paintings. They intend to draw the viewer from the built environments of the city—urban landscapes that are too often “emotionally unsettling,” as she says—and into the calm of the restive animals.

Sometimes, the animals in the images are alone, as in Zen Zebra or Restful Rhino (the titles, too, often tongue-in-cheek, nevertheless point to the contemporary vocabulary of mindfulness). Birds, too, are figured as monk-like in their postures, whether the flamingo, hornbill or scarlet ibis. The Centered Camel even appears to be smiling—indeed, I overheard another viewer at the gallery point out that this was, in fact, as camels often appear.

There are also animals in groups, suggesting, I should think, the sangha, the spiritual community. Stay My Deer imagines four deer, ankle-deep in shallow water, in various aspects of attention, their individual gazes directed into the infinite. Go Giraffe displays two creatures—one presumes mother and child—moving through a seasonal lake. There are, too, the wolves, those mysterious creatures we tend to fear, here seeming to move gently and purposefully—thoughtfully, even—in the same direction, their eyes fixed somewhere beyond the horizon of the frame.

The landscapes are also characters in the images. The thin veils of water, for example, call to attention the mythic trope of the mind, where waters are often figured as the depths of the unconscious. Here, they are mostly a thin veneer, sometimes reflecting the creature standing in the shallows. The desert surfaces, stretching toward the horizons, again suggest the vastness of the quiet mind as well as the openness of nature and the openness that unity with nature cultivates. The skies call to memory the figurations of Chinese paintings, blank surfaces on which our attention plays.

These are, of course, images of nature, both portraits of animals and traditional landscapes. But it’s the unique composite that draws out the message: there is a contemplative aspect that nature can inspire in us, as it likely does in the animals. This is the attitude of Henry David Thoreau or even John Muir. Our concerns, against such a backdrop, are ephemeral at best, even distractions. Our cares, when we are in the quiet of nature—away from traffic, from the stresses of our jobs, from the irritation of standing in line at the bank—recede into the distance like ghostly mountain ranges.

Alice Zilberberg, originally from Estonia, was raised in Israel, and she now lives in Tel Aviv. She studied photography at Toronto Metropolitan University, the city she lived a significant part of her life in, and has since received numerous awards, including the title of Hasselblad Master in the category of wildlife photography in 2021 and this year’s Julia Margaret Cameron Award from FotoNostrum Magazine. Perhaps unsurprisingly, she painted as a child, and she says she began to use Photoshop even before she began photography properly.

She travels widely: India, Israel, Canada, and the U. S. have all served as subjects for these digital paintings. Her art is an example of minimalism, where the subject itself, meditation, itself rests in minimalism, relying on a simplicity of outlook and at the same time opening us to the multiplicity of experience.

Speaking purely for myself, as someone working on composites, I found her approach in the images inspiring. Their meticulous construction suggests focus and care, an intense determination to create something new. It is likely that she herself disappears into the work, as I have with my own composites, and achieves a state of meditation.

The images made me remember, too, a squirrel I once saw in my yard, lying entirely relaxed on a maple limb in the sun as if it were a gray cloth draped over the branch. Such a state calls to mind lines by another poet, Walt Whitman, who wrote, “I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contained…”

In Zilberberg’s photographs, one has the opportunity, for a moment, to transcend the brittle earth and dissolve in the mist, to regard the animals and, as Whitman goes on to say, to “stand and look at them long and long.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sean Patrick Hill is a photographer, freelance writer, essayist, educator, and poet. He is a graduate of the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. Sean was the 2023 photography artist-in-residence at The Bascom: A Center for Visual Arts, and he has been awarded grants and fellowships from the Kentucky Arts Council, the Great Meadows Foundation, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Elizabeth George Foundation. He is the author of five books and has had solo exhibitions at The Bascom’s Joel Gallery and Louisville Visual Arts.

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