Photographer Captures Animals Staring Back at Him

I am constantly editing and organizing photographs from my archive, and a few years ago I started noticing a stack of photographs of animals that seemed to be looking back at me. At some point—probably very late at night while I was half asleep—I had the idea to pull them together into a series called Animals That Saw Me. The title was a perfect way to invert the way we look at photographs and think of animals in our everyday environment. I love the fact that we have absolutely no idea what they are thinking, or what they saw when they noticed me wandering around. I wanted to take a closer look at that fleeting moment of recognition between species in hopes of being able to consider our world from a completely different perspective, if only for a brief moment.—Ed Panar

Animals That Saw Me is a series by Pennsylvania-based photographer Ed Panar that captures unexpected encounters with various animals. Over the course of 17 years, Panar came face to face with these animals while wandering around backstreets and side roads of different towns and cities.

Feature Shoot Contributing Editor Julia Sabot is the Associate Photo Editor at Dwell.

Discover More