On September 8, 2023, photographer Tanya Marcuse photographed a deer that died in the woods. She returned repeatedly to photograph the deer until its body disappeared nineteen months later, in April 2025. What unfolds in these photographs is not a straightforward chronicle of decomposition, but a metaphysical transformation, as the deer seems to unravel into the universe.
Through embellishments that verge on the alchemical, including the use of fire, Marcuse’s photographs transform the deer’s body into a portal from the terrestrial to the celestial, from matter to myth. Tanya Marcuse’s work investigates cycles of life and decay, and photography’s capacity to probe what lies beyond empirical fact. Deer extends this inquiry to its most distilled form. At once lavish and unflinching, these sixteen images hover between fantasy and fact, evoking an enigmatic hybrid of Ana Mendieta’s ritualistic earthworks and the dense symbolism of medieval tapestries.
David Campany writes in his essay, “Any place photographed becomes a stage, if only because it is in the nature of a camera to dramatize, turning what is photographed, and even the very place itself, into signs. Enigmatic signs, but signs nonetheless. To photograph a corpse in its resting place, then, is to stage its stage, and to image its image.”
Deer features a special insert composed of fragments of Marcuse’s own writings, written in the second person and addressed directly to the deer.