We Animals - the Book

My name is Jo-Anne McArthur and I’m a photojournalist and animal advocate. I'm also the central human subject in Liz Marshall's documentary about animals, The Ghosts in Our Machine (release: 2013). Ten years ago I created a project called We Animals. What started as a small photo essay about our uses and abuses of animals has grown into an internationally renowned archive. From whale-poaching in the Antarctic to sheep farming in Australia, from zoos in North America to macaque farms in Southeast Asia, the project has grown to cover a lot of ground.

My goals have always been to educate people about our treatment of animals. To reduce their suffering. To widen our circle of compassion to include non-human animals. To make animal industries visible, and accountable.

One more way that We Animals can do this is through this book project. We are trying to broaden our horizon and diversify our audience. By supporting this book project, you’ll be supporting these goals as well.

We need to raise $32.5k to make this project a reality, and here is the breakdown of costs. I'm working with Lantern Books and the editor-in-chief and publisher Martin Rowe to produce this book. It costs money to edit, copyedit, typeset, and design a book—even before you actually print and ship the copies—and photography books require the right kind of paperstock and printing expertise to show the photos in their best light. By asking you to buy your copy or copies before they're printed, we not only make sure we don't waste paper by printing exactly the number we need, but we save money—for you, for Lantern, and for We Animals.

We’re offering many ways in which you can invest in this project. Have a look and thanks so much for taking part!

Not able to fund this project at the moment but want to help anyway? Please share this campaign widely. Let every animal-lover, veg*an and compassionate person you know about this exciting project. Help us make some noise!

A bit of info about one of the perks: Martin Rowe has written a book called The Polar Bear at the Zoo, which examines one of my photographs in the context of the series along with the work of several other photographers of captive animals. Martin looks at the ways we frame our ideas about them within the exposure and capture provided by the photograph and the zoo. This perk is the hard copy of the book, not the e-book.