Lawrence Kubski DOMESTICATE

“The world is too wide to see everything with our own eyes,” says Lausanne, Switzerlandbased photographer Laurence Kubski. “Photography is a good medium to tell stories, to witness situations and to broaden our view.”

Preferring to take on several roles to communicate a concept—bearing witness with her camera, telling stories through design and finding ways of disseminating it to the world—Kubski doesn't simply label herself a photographer: she’s also a graphic designer and art director, having studied these two subjects at ECAL/University of Art and Design, Lausanne.

Her most recent magazine series, “Domesticate,” completed as part of her master’s thesis project, applies her graphic aesthetic to still-life images and long captions that illuminate the interaction between humans and animals. Noting that most publications about animals are often intended for “hunters, wildlife photographers, environmentalists or animal owners,” she wanted to go beyond this context to tell culturally diverse stories about the long history of human domestication of animals, and the ways these concepts have changed through cultural modernization.

Seen in this series: a Fukuro café in Tokyo where people spend time with nocturnal birds of prey, a songbird in its sculpted cage at the Hong Kong bird market, lynx tongues ordered from an online taxidermy shop, insect boxes from Shanghai “where crickets are kept for singing according to a tradition more than a thousand years old” and a dried snake used in China to treat arthritis.

—Lindsay Comstock

Photos © Laurence Kubski laurence-kubski.com