My PhD thesis, The Latent Animal Image: Exposing Suffering and Developing Change (2025), examines the question “why create and view photographs of animal cruelty and suffering?” I am particularly interested in situations where suffering is clearly visible, but we choose not to see it, or perhaps we frame the suffering through a different lens, such as in a roadside zoo. Roadside zoos are privately owned menageries of wild “exotic” animals that have been turned into a business where the public can pay to see, and sometimes touch, the animals. In these zoos, animals spend their lives on display and in confinement. Since roadside zoos are legally sanctioned, open to the public, and they encourage visitors to take pictures, they are a powerful tool to examine and perhaps reframe what it means to look at animal suffering. As a photographer and artist, I have engaged in a three-year photography project depicting the animals who live in these roadside zoos, mostly in the USA. The inspiration for this project rests on the hope that photographing animal suffering can lead to change. This hope needs critical examination, and throughout this thesis, I critique photographs of animal suffering and examine what change (if any) is possible and for whom.

The purpose of this thesis is to offer a critical examination of what it means to create and circulate images of animal suffering. As part of this analysis I examine issues of looking, gaze, empathy, and bearing witness. I conclude with a discussion on photography as a form of activism.