Exclusive Interview with Alan Schaller about 'Street Safari'

Alan Schaller’s second monograph, Street Safari, brings together a lifelong fascination with animals and his distinctive approach to black-and-white street photography. Following Metropolis, his acclaimed first book, Schaller turns his lens toward the animals that inhabit our cities, from familiar companions and urban wildlife to more unexpected encounters.

Across streets and cities around the world, Street Safari reveals the visual possibilities found in these everyday encounters. Light, shadow, geometry, contrast and abstraction shape the photographs, transforming fleeting moments into carefully observed compositions that can be humorous, surprising, tense or quietly beautiful. The book offers a fresh perspective on the urban environment, seen through the presence and movement of the animals that share it with us.

London-based photographer, Leica Ambassador and co-founder of Street Photography International, Schaller has built an internationally recognised body of work around the language of black-and-white street photography. His practice has been exhibited in more than 30 solo exhibitions and published and commissioned widely. Alongside his photography, he is also the founder of Irys, a photography-first platform and creative ecosystem created to support photographers and encourage meaningful connections within the medium.

Produced by Irys Publishing and printed in Italy by EBS, Street Safari is a carefully crafted hardback that brings together this distinctive and deeply personal side of Schaller’s photographic practice. We spoke with Alan about the origins of the project, his long-standing relationship with photographing animals, and the making of the book.

All About Photo: Street Safari grew out of photographs you had been making for years. When did you begin to see them as a book?

Alan Schaller: I have photographed animals alongside people from the start of my photography, without thinking of it as a distinct project. One day, I was in the Arctic and a pigeon landed on my balcony. I photographed it and realized I had made pictures of pigeons all over the world and it got me thinking about animals in the street as a project. At first, I considered doing a book about dogs or cats, but I had photographs of so many different animals that a broader series made more sense.

I was also inspired by photographers such as Elliott Erwitt, who made books about animals, and Tim Flach, who is an amazing animal photographer. I'm certainly not the first photographer to explore the subject, but seeing their work made me want to approach it in my own way. Street Safari was the result.

What changes when you photograph animals in an urban environment rather than people?

Whatever I photograph, whether people, animals, fashion, or commercial work, I approach it in the same way. The fundamentals are always the interaction between subject, light, and environment.

You can't communicate with animals in the same way you can with people, obviously, but most urban animals are accustomed to living alongside us, and you can interact with them just enough. If you tell a non-photographer that you photograph animals, they often assume you're a wildlife photographer. But photographing them in cities reveals something about us, too, about our streets, structures, and ways of living.

Your photographs depend on timing, geometry, and a precise relationship between figure and background. How do you achieve that precision with an unpredictable animal?

It's about anticipation. The more you photograph animals, the more you learn to predict their behavior. It doesn't always work, but I tend to approach a scene with an ideal outcome in mind, or work toward one while making a sequence of photographs. I'm always trying to achieve something rather than leaving it entirely to chance. That gives you a better hit rate and more consistency.

You have to make decisions and commit to them, whether they're right or wrong, and review them later. Over the years, I've become better at understanding what I want from a scene and what is or isn't possible.

Humor runs through many of these photographs. Is that something you consciously seek?

My first book, Metropolis, was a much more somber view of life around me. With animals, I naturally gravitate toward humorous moments, situations people will recognize or find funny. Dogs in particular provide many of them.

I remember photographing a tiny frog on a large leaf in Hawaii. It puffed itself up and glared at me. The humor came from the contrast: it was tiny and harmless, but clearly trying to be a little fighter.

Why did you choose black and white, and how does that visual language shape the way you portray everyday places?

Black and white wasn't essential to the subject but it's essential to how I like to photograph. Much of my work comes from a monochrome mindset. It informs how I use light, the decisions I make, and why I'm drawn to a scene. The project could have been made successfully in color, but black and white is part of my photographic language.

My definition of street photography is observing interesting things in everyday life, in the mundane world around us. Many of the pictures in Street Safari were made in ordinary places: a street corner, a train platform, even a leaf. Sometimes the more mundane the environment, the more gripping the image becomes, because the viewer recognizes how ordinary the place was.

When I discovered street photography, I was drawn to Henri Cartier-Bresson's work and the way he found magical moments in seemingly unremarkable places. That has defined much of my own work. I try not to depend on particular locations or models. I want to be able to work creatively in any environment and make something interesting with as little as possible.

Is there one image that represents the book for you?

It's not hard to take one good photograph, it's hard to take hundreds of good ones. Everyone can take a good picture. The question is whether you can build a body of work that makes sense. My emotional attachment to an image usually ends the second I've taken it, and then I'm on to the next one. The exciting part is the anticipation of getting the picture.

The yin-and-yang swan photograph on the cover of Street Safari does have a certain symbolism. People have told me that it evokes life and death, and it allows for many interpretations. From a purely photographic point of view, I was responding to what the birds were doing and trying to make the most of the scene. I became aware that I could form a yin-and-yang shape by paying attention to the distance between the birds and the central shadow line: the reflection of the trees in the water. It wasn't until the image was finished that I thought, "That's a pretty good shot."

What do you hope readers take from the book, both when they first encounter it and when they return to it?

I shoot primarily for myself. Photography is now my profession, but ultimately I try to make work that satisfies me. I hope that comes through and that people find something meaningful in the images. Many of us form connections with animals through childhood or the pets in our lives, so the subject already feels familiar and personal.

I also hope the book reminds people that interesting moments are all around them. I've been very lucky to travel the world while making this work, but you could create a great series about animals by returning to the same dog park for a couple of years. You don't need to travel far. You need to be observant, because magical moments are unfolding everywhere.

I hope people enjoy the book each time they pick it up. We see images differently as we gain experience and bring more of our own lives to them. Our view of things changes over time, so the work may reveal something different when a reader returns to it.

How did the sequencing, scale, paper, and printing shape the book as a physical object?

The sequence went through many revisions. We went back and forth, looking for repetition, considering the overall flow, and finding visual connections between photographs.

I modeled the dimensions on one of my favorite books, by the photographer Fan Ho. My first book was quite a bit larger and, while that made it more dramatic, I wanted Street Safari to be something people could pass around a living room or leaf through on the sofa. Children love animals too, so I didn't want it to be too large.

The print quality was something I wouldn't compromise on. We wanted the finished book to feel high-end but simple. I wrote a short introduction, and the cover has only an image, the title, and my name; there isn't even an image on the back. It's stripped back because I like to let the photographs speak for themselves. The project took ten years, so it was worth spending a few days at the press at EBS to make sure it would be presented how I wanted.

Why did you publish Street Safari through Irys Publishing rather than follow a traditional photobook model?

If you have your own audience and the resources to cover the printing, it makes much more sense these days to control your own publishing. In many cases, publishers charge the photographer a lot of money or take a very large percentage of sales, even though the photographs are yours and they generally publish you only if they believe you can sell a lot of books.

I had enough connections to design, manufacture, and distribute the book while retaining a better return. We can pass that advantage on to the artists we work with in the future, and we can still place books in shops. It also avoids tensions over the cover image, sequencing, and other creative decisions. Photographers work on these projects for a long time, and the books should look the way they want them to look. Rather than trying to persuade publishers to work that way, we decided to create the service ourselves.

How do you define success for a book?

There is a big difference between financial success and artistic success. Sometimes they go hand in hand, but not always. Work that is different can be criticized when it first appears and recognized only later; meanwhile, terrible films can make billions of dollars. I believe work with genuine artistic merit can ultimately succeed financially, but many things behind the scenes have little to do with the quality of the book: how much you've promoted yourself, how active and engaged your audience is, and what connections you have.

I'm very proud of the book and the body of work. I push myself to make better images and to be honest about what belongs and what doesn't. If you're consistent about that and work hard to present the book as well as possible, you can feel satisfied with what you've made. Street Safari has also been well received and sold well, so the experience has been positive. But artistic and financial success are not necessarily linked, at least not immediately.

How does Street Safari relate to Metropolis, and is the project now complete?

The two projects were photographed concurrently, so the mindset was only slightly different. Whether I'm photographing animals, street scenes, or a commercial assignment, I approach the work in the same way: thinking about the interplay of light, environment, subject, and perspective.

The objectives for each picture change according to the material and what is happening in front of you. You have to let the scene dictate many things. That's what I love about street photography: you approach life in your own way, and the variety comes to you through the subject and environment. The finished books are very different, but the underlying approach is surprisingly similar.

I've continued photographing animals since Street Safari went into production, just as I kept making pictures that could have belonged in Metropolis after it was published in 2023. These projects grew out of my interests and passions. They weren't briefs that ended when the job was done, and those interests haven't left me.

It is useful to reach a point where you put a body of work into the world. It forces you to reassess and think of new ideas; that's part of being an artist or photographer, or whatever you want to call me. Don't be surprised to see another volume about animals at some point, but it won't be soon. I have other things to say in the meantime.