Colleen Plumb: Thirty Times a Minute

Captive elephants exhibit what biologists refer to as stereotypy, which includes rhythmic rocking, head bobbing, stepping back and forth, and pacing. 

COLLEEN PLUMB traveled to over seventy zoos in the US and Europe, and created video featuring dozens of captive elephants in their small enclosures. She has photographed her guerrilla public projections of the video in over 100 locations worldwide. 

Thirty Times a Minute includes a selection of these photos, along with nine contributions from animal rights activists and scientists, in order to examine the way animals in captivity function as colonialist symbols of human domination over nature.

Colleen Plumb makes photographs, videos, and installations investigating contradictory relationships people have with nonhuman animals. Her work explores the way animals in captivity function as symbols of persistent colonial thinking, that a striving for human domination over nature has been normalized, and that consumption masks as curiosity. Plumb's work sheds light on abnormal behaviors of captive animals in order to bring attention to implicit values of society as a whole, particularly those that perpetuate power imbalance and tyranny of artifice.

One of her recent projects, Invisible Visible, published in Orion Magazine, reflects upon the industrial food system and meatpacking industry through the bones and bodies of chickens. Her 2021 installation, Surveilling Snow Lily, was highlighted as a Chicago must-see in ARTFORUM gallery guide.

Plumb's work is held in several permanent collections and has been widely exhibited, including the Portland Art Museum, Milwaukee Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, Blue Sky Oregon Center for the Photographic Arts in Portland, 21c, Oolite Arts in Miami, Center for Fine Art Photography in Fort Collins, Southeast Museum of Photography in Daytona Beach, Jen Bekman Gallery in New York, Edelman Gallery, AIPAD/Pier 94 in New York, Historic Water Tower Gallery and Notebaert Nature Museum in Chicago. Her work has been part of the Midwest Photographers Project at the Museum of Contemporary Photography since 2003.

Her first photography monograph, Animals Are Outside Today (Radius Books, 2011) critically documents ambivalent dispositions towards animals. Plumb's recent photography book, Thirty Times a Minute (Radius Books, 2020), examines the plight of captive elephants. Plumb's work has appeared in LitHub, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Village Voice, Blow Photo Magazine, New York Times LENS, Time Lightbox, Psychology Today, Oxford American, Photo District News, and Orion Magazine.

As a fourth-generation Chicagoan, Colleen Plumb grew up near Lake Michigan, seeing and seeking wildness within that urban landscape: from backyard birds to tree climbs and lake storms. She continues this exploration, focusing on relationships between humans and nature to increase empathy and unity across species and within our own. Collaborating with nonprofit organizations advocating for nonhuman animals, Plumb seeks to shift dialog around what is humane. Currently serving as faculty at Columbia College Chicago and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, she is represented by McCormick Gallery in Chicago and Dina Mitrani Gallery in Miami.