Janna Fullbright

Janna Fulbright

February 1-28, 1996

As a child, I was surrounded by animals. My father was a hunter, and he brought home animals of all kinds: squirrels, rabbits, duck, javelina. He also was and still is an excellent nurse. His profession and his hobbies had a profound effect on me as a child. In my father and later in myself, the seemingly incongruous ideas of hunting and healing went hand in hand. That was the value in our upbringing: to understand that brutality and benevolence were two sides of the same coin. I was taught that it was impossible to separate what you eat or displace from its environment from yourself. No one can live without consuming living things. Further, we as humans could not survive if we did not care for one another as healers.

As an adult and a photographer, I am exploring those principles I was taught as a child. I want to photograph animals and processes that we overlook because they are not important or they are unsavory to our sense of beauty. I find beauty in stitches, lizards, false teeth, worms – those things that are of monumental significance to a child. The very things we overlook are those things which make us as we are as humans – both hunters and healers.