For Animal Visions, photographer Tom Chambers explores the uncanny bond between human and animal. Drawing on his childhood experiences on a family farm in Pennsylvania, he constructs an enchanting world wherein small children and great, gentle beasts revel together in wondrous imagination. Museums and villas shot in Italy and plush Virginian landscapes serve as the sumptuous backdrops for these hallucinogenic narratives, where the animals, originally photographed in zoos around Washington DC and Virginia, are composited. Each component, captured on film, is meticulously melded together digitally, creating a resplendent tactile richness.

Here, the animal spirit seems to contain within it the abundant wonders of a realm just beyond the boundaries of domestic reality. As we venture into its strange golden haze, the world becomes vibrant as an oil painting, and logic gives way to a thrilling yet uncertain hypnagogia. The beasts become our formidable guides and devoted protectors, exotic beings that are both very like ourselves yet by some magical twist of fate, possessed of a miraculous otherness.