Cat Watching

I'm not going to pretend that I'm not a Crazy Cat Lady waiting to happen, because I really am. I love cats to bits. I think they're better than both sliced bread and microwavable pizza. So when I work my volunteer shift at an animal shelter every saturday morning I tend to get carried away staring at all the adorable bundles of fluff that are unfortunate enough to need to be taken in, and take hundreds of pictures so that I can show my friends and family. 

All the pictures shown in this post are my own, taken with a phone, and don't even come close to indicating the true volume of pictures I have of cats and other animals. The ones here are literally half of what I happened to have on my phone at the time of writing this. 

Upon realising the sad truth of my obsession, I felt like I understood how Miroslav Tichý felt about photographing all those hundreds of women. I really just want to document every cat which comes to the shelter, partly so that I have a record of them, but also because some of them are so gorgeous it melts my heart. And if weren't for the fact that I can store the images digitally I would be less inclined to take so many pictures, but the availabilty of digital cameras, computers and hard drives allows me to indulge myself. I'm sure that if I had to develop each photograph and physically store them like Tichy did with his hoard of photos, I wouldn't bother to take so many pictures. But as it is, it's just so easy to keep taking an embarrassing amount of pictures so that I can look at them whenever the mood takes me. 

It makes me think that being able to digitally store images probably encourages voyeuristic behaviour in people because it's easier to justify or brush off as a quirk of character. I know plenty of people who have folders and folders on their computers filled with pictures of celebrities they admire and they think nothing of it because the images are so readily available to them. The fact that it's a digital collection provides a sense of detatchment which prevents the person feeling like a stalker; there's something about keeping physical copies of somebody's image which feels much more personal. Thanks to Google, anyone can type anything into the search bar and find masses of information and pictures ready to be used as the person wishes. And while this is brilliant for learning and communicating with people, it can also be grossly misused. 

For example, I am publishing my photos of these cats on the internet without their consent and knowledge, which is deemed permissable because they don't even know what a computer is, but if I were to post up pictures of people without their consent it would a breach of their right to privacy. I would also feel extremely uncomfortble photographing people without their knowledge because I know it's unethical. (See Shizuka Yokomizo who found an interesting way around this which I love.) But I think that photographing animals gives you the freedom to stare to your hearts content without any ethical issues- as long as you don't disturb/mistreat the animals, that is.