Stockland Martel

All photographs by Bruce Wolf.

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If you’ve ever owned a cat that had outdoor privileges, you know that they occasionally like to bring home presents. Presents that once were alive. Little beasts that they’ve gone and valiantly slain for you and brought to your doorstep. That’s fine when you have only a cat or two. But when you have almost 40 felines, as Bruce Wolf and his family did when they lived in rural Westchester County, New York, you wind up with heaps and piles of blood-stained presents. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Inspired by the book Sleeping Beauty: Memorial Photography in America, Bruce decided to start photographing his pets’ prizes. Shot on a black background, the tender, partially eviscerated bodies of birds, mice, and even insects have the elevated beauty and rich tones of an Old Masters still life. After he’d amassed a collection of these images, he showed them to Gold Bug Gallery Pasadena, which has a next-door shop that reminded him of the store Evolution. “They have a lot of artists who contribute things that are dark,” he told me last week on the phone from Portland, Oregon, where he is now based.

Starting Thursday, Gold Bug will be exhibiting “Death by Cat,” a show of Bruce’s photographs. In a story published Saturday, the Los Angeles Chronicle called it “a scandalous collection,” which is high praise indeed.

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Bruce sent me a short essay he wrote about “Death by Cat.” Here it is:

“About 10 years ago, my wife and son decided that our house should be a sanctuary for any cat that needed a home. As we lived in a rural section of Westchester County, N.Y. the cats we took in were able to roam on more than 70 acres of woodlands. They had access to the outdoors and our house 24 hours a day. Some only lived outside, some never ventured out, some only visited the house every few months, some disappeared. At it’s height the cat population hovered around 40 grown cats. A by-product of this “herd” was that almost daily, we found various animals and birds that they killed during the night. Although this was a problem for us, we knew that this is what cats do for a living, it was part of Nature. We kept the cats well fed and saved any animal that was alive, but we wound up disposing of many, many more dead critters.

Over the course of my career as a Commercial Photographer, I became familiar with a book of Victorian era photographs, called, Sleeping Beauties. Photography was still in it’s infancy in Victorian times and it was extremely rare for the average person to be photographed. As this new technology of photography spread, people soon started having recently deceased relatives photographed as a way of preserving their image and memory. Whether this was promoted by certain early professional photographers is not known, but knowing photographers as I do, it probably was. The photographs in this book are of people posed to be as lifelike as possible and restored, when they died through a violent act or accident. Of course the success of this restoration varied considerably. The images are very powerful.

As I continually disposed of these dead animals, I remembered this book and decided to photograph these animals, in the condition I found them. It was sort of a memorial to the animal. To connect to the Victorian photographs I chose to have all the images on a black background. I did little to “pose” the bodies and hence some are like animal studies, some are comic, some are gruesome, and some reveal the fear and the violence of the death. No matter what the animal, I tried to maintain a certain elegance and dignity in the images. After more than six years of preparing these photographs, this is the first time I am showing them in public.”

For directions and gallery hours, please visit Gold Bug’s website.

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