Jean-Christophe Béchet’s American Animals begins with a recurring feature of everyday life in the United States: the unexpected proximity of wild and domestic animals. Alligators rest beside roads in Florida; deer appear before cars in California; bison cross highways in Montana; sea lions occupy San Francisco’s waterfront. Birds repeatedly enter inhabited spaces, including Bodega Bay, where Alfred Hitchcock filmed The Birds in 1963. Béchet treats these encounters not as a comprehensive account of American wildlife, but as observations of how animals share human environments.
The method is deliberately removed from conventional wildlife photography. Working without a zoom or telephoto lens, tripod, or hide, Béchet used a standard fixed-focal-length lens and a square format, first with film and later digitally. The resulting premise is one of physical nearness and responsiveness: the photographer remains within the circumstances of the encounter rather than extracting the animal from its surroundings. Roads, ports, vehicles, and settled landscapes consequently become part of the subject.
Published by Trans Photographic Press in 2018, this 48-page French-language hardcover is volume eight of Béchet’s Carnets series and the opening part of his American Trilogy. The series grows from a practice maintained over twenty-five years: Béchet assembled photographs in more than 150 hand-made notebooks, organizing them through theme, chronology, place, narrative, and association. American Animals retains the concentrated, provisional intelligence of that working process, presenting a defined group of images rather than an encyclopedic survey.
For a photobook collection, its interest lies in this convergence of subject and method. It records an American landscape indirectly, through moments when animal movement interrupts ordinary human space, while also marking Béchet’s first sustained turn toward animal photography. Within the larger Carnets project, the book offers a compact example of how personal archives, associative editing, and a consistent formal constraint can transform chance encounters into a coherent photographic study.
