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With an introduction by Agnès de Gouvion Saint-Cyr
(Translated from the French by Kevin J. M. Keane)
Look inside the book
Reared and groomed by dedicated owners for participation in pageants, ornamental chickens, including the impressive Malaysian breed of Ayam Serama, project a natural and seemingly effortless charisma rivalling that of human models. Ernest Goh’s award-winning portraits capture the full range of these beautiful birds’ personalities: puffed chests, ruffled plumage, bowed heads and all. By turns provocative, humorous and surprising, the photographs in Cocks will move you to view our humble feathered friends in an entirely different light.
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“Smile-inducing and surprisingly hypnotic…it’s not hard to identify a human spirit inside Goh’s winged subjects.”
—Priscilla Frank, The Huffington Post
“Think you know chickens? Ernest Goh wants you to take another look.”
—Kyle Almond, CNN
“The original funky chickens.”
—Josh Davis, The Observer
“Goh’s photos convey the power, beauty and majesty of the breed...Goh seeks to expose the odd shades of humanity in the birds, by giving them respect and admiration typically reserved for human subjects. His subjects are not anonymous; they’re characters.”
—Matthew Ismael Ruiz, Photo District News
“Ernest Goh proves himself to be an excellent portraitist…He plays with light in a way that moulds the body in the same way that light moulds a work of sculpture”
—from the introduction by Agnès de Gouvion Saint-Cyr
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Ernest Goh’s passion for animals was nurtured as a young boy wading in the streams of his grandmother’s kampong looking for fishes. He considers his passion for animals a natural extension of his interest in photographing the human condition. In The Fish Book (Wee Editions, 2011) he presented a whimsical study of the ornamental fish in SIingapore. In 2013, he won the second prize in the Nature & Wildlife category at the Sony World Photography Awards for his portraits of fowls. He is now the creative director of The Animal Book Co., an outfit that focuses on animal appreciation.
