Colleen Plumb spent years filming elephants in more than seventy zoos across the United States and Europe. The animals rock, bob their heads, step back and forth, and pace—a repertoire biologists call stereotypy, the visible residue of confinement. She distilled that footage into a video, and then took it back into the world as guerrilla public projections in over one hundred locations, photographing each projection where it landed. Thirty Times a Minute, titled after an elephant’s resting heart rate, brings those photographs together and places them in the company of nine texts by contributors including Marc Bekoff, Julia Cooke, and Steven M. Wise.

The book’s distinguishing move is its refusal to let the zoo remain the only stage. Cast onto buildings, facades, and other out-of-context surfaces, the elephant’s image is separated twice from the animal: first by captivity, then by projection. The photographed projection is not documentation of an event so much as a new image with its own urban setting, and the reader is asked to hold both states in view. That doubled distance is the project’s method, and it implicates the viewer and the street rather than leaving judgment at the enclosure gate.

As the publisher frames it, the work examines how animals in captivity function as colonialist symbols of human domination over nature, and how consumption can pass for curiosity. The nine texts, by writers and researchers, open that argument onto ethics, animal behavior, and law without turning the book into a treatise. Plumb’s photographs remain the argument’s spine.

The volume is a hardcover from Radius Books with fifty-eight images. For a photography collection, its interest lies in the conjunction it sustains: a long-recorded animal behavior and an image deliberately displaced into civic space. That combination—the same image made to perform in two registers—is what a reader is likely to return to.