A Day at the Zoo by Jennifer Kay

I approach shooting family pictures the same way I approach other assignments. I try to keep backgrounds clean, and I look for candid moments and graphic elements that will keep the images from devolving into static snapshots.

 I recently spent the day at the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago with my brother and his family. It was cold, so we spent most of our time inside the buildings where the great apes, primates and big cats were housed. 

In the great ape house, we watched zoo trainers work with two gorillas through a mesh wall. I saw how the gorillas would mimic the movements of their trainers, and I wanted to show a kind of mirror image illustrating that behavior. 








Shooting through the glass of their enclosure, I framed the gorilla and the trainer with a piece of the wall between them.

Elsewhere, I looked for ways to show the relationship between the animals in their enclosures and the humans watching them. I tried to capture frames of my family and the apes in profile, of the animals in motion and the size differences between the humans and the zoo animals.