Alfons Alt photographs animals as if they were having their portraits taken. In The Nature of the Beast, each animal is treated as an individual rather than an example of a species, and that distinction shapes the whole book. The photographs recall a medieval bestiary while remaining inescapably contemporary in visual approach and content. The work won the European Publishers Award for Photography 1999.

The method behind that effect is unusual. Alt uses Résino-pigmentype, an early pigmentary, non-silver process based on the capacity of gelatine to harden in contact with the sun. This allows him to manipulate the colouration of the images so that each becomes a unique, one-off picture, and the plates seem almost to be portrait paintings rather than documentary records.

The book was published by Dewi Lewis in 2000: hardback, 140 pages, 80 colour plates, 245mm x 310mm, ISBN 1-899235-43-4.

For a collector, the interest lies in that intersection of historical process and contemporary sensibility. Books built around a single early printing method are relatively uncommon, and the bestiary tradition gives the sequence a literary and art-historical frame without reducing the animals to illustration. What distinguishes the book is its insistence on the animal as subject: Alt’s portraits ask the viewer to meet a gaze rather than classify a species, and the printing process sustains that intimacy on the page.