Family Genus Species

We are pleased to announce that Family Genus Species, Jeff Whetstone’s first monograph, is now available for preorder.

Family Genus Species follows lives spent loving animals and negotiating man. Set in the backwoods, black-and-white photographs and short stories bring together Jeff Whetstone’s vision as both an artist and writer.

The title invokes Linnaean taxonomy, a system for classifying living things. The book draws on this order to consider the shifting relationships among people, animals, and the land.

Written with close observation and flashes of dark humor, the stories present animals and plants as sources of fascination, refuge, and uncertainty—and as a language for experiences the characters’ struggle to understand or express directly. A harmless animal can feel deadly; a creature believed to be dangerous may prove vulnerable; a plant’s scientific name can carry the memory of the person who first revealed it. Field guides, family lore, religious belief, and direct experience do not always agree, making what is known, imagined, or inherited difficult to separate.

Rendered in a rich, dark tonal range, the photographs move between intimate acts and communal rituals, human figures and animal specimens, natural growth and altered landscapes. Animals appear not only as living presences but as bodies that are handled, hunted, collected, or arranged for study. People are immersed in their surroundings through play and movement, while the land’s dense vegetation appears poised to absorb their imprint.

Together, the photographs and stories portray human life as part of—not apart from—the natural world they seek to describe and order.

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Jeff Whetstone’s work is held in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Yale University Art Gallery, the Nasher Museum of Art, and the North Carolina Museum of Art, among others. He holds a BS in zoology from Duke University and an MFA from Yale University. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2007, Whetstone is Professor of the Practice of Art at Princeton University.