In a perhaps excessively familiar passage of his essay on the analytical language of John Wilkins, Borges ascribes to a certain Dr. Franz Kuhn the recollection that an ancient Chinese encyclopaedia with the improbable name of The Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge divided the animal kingdom into fourteen all-embracing categories. Among the proposed categories, not the least unlikely were "those that belong to the Emperor"; "stray dogs"; "those that tremble as if they were mad"; "those drawn with a very fine camel's hair brush"; "those that resemble flies from a distance"; and "those included in the present classification".
Most commentators are content to recycle this account as a mildly pedantic academic witticism at the expense of unworldly Confucian intellectuals; few bother to turn to the subsequent pages of the essay, in which Borges concludes that this system is not necessarily any less arbitrary than others, since "there is obviously no classification of the universe that is not arbitrary and conjectural. The reason is very simple: we do not know what the universe is".
Nor can it be claimed that such essentially arbitrary systems are invariably impractical. Borges might have mentioned (but chose not to) the Dewey Decimal Classification System which still governs most American libraries, in which the number 563 arbitrarily covers miscellaneous fossil marine and seashore invertebrates, while number 945 includes the history of the Italian Peninsula and adjacent islands.
In its richness and complexity, the world of nature inevitably proved the most intractable to categorisation. In 1753, the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus first conceived of the structure still in use today for the purposes of biological classification and nomenclature, though the actual principles of classification propounded by him have long since been superseded by a more rigorous and scientifically respectable phylogeneticaly-based classification.
The point about systems such as that of Linnaeus is that we only realise how much they contribute to our understanding of the world after they have come into being. The classification proposed by the art critic (and quondam photographer) Ian Jeffrey in his Bestiary is unusual insofar as it addresses, not the animal kingdom in the abstract, but the depiction of animals by and in relation to human beings. Rather therefore than separate animals into such traditional categories as (say) molluscs, arthropods, amphibia and mammals, Jeffrey creates new categories along the lines of "Animals in Context", "Animals Hostile to Man", "Animals in Groups" and "False Friends", filling them with his own carefully considered examples.
How does someone who has spent a lifetime considering photographic imagery approach the taking of photographs? Partly, it seems, by seeking out found imagery, but mostly through the shrewd observation of cultural and visual minutiae. In the preface to his recent Revisions, Jeffrey posits the existence of a "cultural unconscious, an art simultaneously significant and enigmatic", suggesting that it constitutes a world which has consistently preoccupied photography; in a manner not far removed from that of Atget, he constructs an image of the world based on an analysis of significant detail.
"Outside Shinagawa Station in Tokyo I noticed some screens of seabirds flying past a coastal landscape. One of the panels had been hung upside down, though I didn't notice it at first. The background landscape was so obscure and a regular seabird doesn't look too different this side up or the other way. I was moved that the gulls flew so steadily upside down . . . [That's] photography for you." (Ian Jeffrey, 21.11.00, from a letter to the writer about this exhibition).
Ian Jeffrey, author of Photography: A Concise History and Revisions: An Alternative History of Photography among many other works, is one of the most internationally distinguished critics, historians and commentators on photography. This is his first-ever photographic exhibition. -- J. S.
