Published by Harry N. Abrams in 2012, Tim Flach’s More Than Human assembles an expansive cast of animals within a substantial 300-page, square-format hardcover. Pandas, tigers, bats, lions, orangutans, cobras, bullfrogs, chimpanzees, wolves, porcupines, elephants, owls, and armadillos are among its subjects. The breadth matters: this is neither a field guide nor a survey organized primarily by taxonomy, but a sustained inquiry into how animals are pictured—and how humans recognize themselves in those pictures.
Flach approaches animal photography through the conventions of portraiture. His intimate, controlled images direct attention toward gaze, gesture, anatomy, surface, and bearing rather than habitat or dramatic action. By granting each creature concentrated visual presence, he makes familiar species appear newly strange and unfamiliar ones unexpectedly legible. The precision of the photographs does not flatten their subjects into specimens; instead, it sharpens the tension between close observation and human projection.
The title identifies the book’s central proposition. These photographs invite comparison across species without erasing physical difference, placing resemblance beside radical variations of scale, skin, fur, feather, and form. Texts written and edited by Lewis Blackwell provide a complementary verbal framework, expanding the project beyond a portfolio of striking animal studies into a considered examination of the bond between human and nonhuman life.
For collectors concerned with animal photography, contemporary portraiture, or the changing representation of nature, More Than Human offers a coherent intersection of those fields. Its generous square dimensions and long sequence give the work room to accumulate through contrast and recurrence: vulnerability follows force, the commonplace meets the extraordinary, and one attentive encounter modifies the next. The book deserves attention not simply for individual images, but for the disciplined editorial structure through which a diverse menagerie becomes an argument about looking.
